Mr Bachmann and his Class

Maria Speth’s intimate non-fiction epic profiles a spiky but saintly German schoolteacher and his students.

As far as the cinematic canon of inspirational school teachers go, beanie-hatted paragon of chill, Deiter Bachmann, is right up there. This observational non-fiction epic sees filmmaker Maria Speth and (you would imagine) her tiny technical team embedded within a class at a junior school located in the west German industrial berg of Stadtallendorf, an area which attracts a large migrant community, many of whom we discover are using the spot as a way station en route to their final destination.

On a superficial level, Speth’s film offers intimate insight into the nuances of teaching and the ethical balancing act that comes with attempting to imbue knowledge into the minds of an ethnically and behaviourally diverse range of kids. The film is interested very little in the bureaucracy of teaching, and it never appears as if Bachmann is desperately attempting to mould these children in the image of a monolithic national curriculum. Instead, he engages his charges in a series of wide ranging discourses in which the basic strictures of liberal morality are delivered with comic stealth.

We are introduced to Bachmann as he politely demands all his children walk out of the classroom and return in silence, never raising his voice, but also not receiving any clap-backs from the abiding students. Any sense that he’s a brutal disciplinarian are swiftly tossed out, as the lessons themselves comprise of wide-ranging and inclusive discussions that seldom involve a pen and paper. In fact, rather than a blackboard, Bachmann’s tool of choice is his trusty acoustic guitar (stay with me!), as he regularly leads the class in song and then cleverly empowers them to deconstruct the lyrics.

The film’s duration – three hours and 36 mins – works very much in its favour, and it really comes into its own by the third hour when we have cultivated relationships with the protagonists and have come to care deeply about the paths of their development. A sequence in which Bachmann meets individual students accompanied with a parent to offer and update on progress is perhaps the moment where his subtle modus operand comes to the fore, as he is not afraid to lobby (“fight” is too strong a word for it) for what he truly believes the kids – rather than himself – want to do in life.

Beyond documenting the hard, at-the-coalface processes of schooling, the film also offers a celebration of European cultural diversity and puts paid to xenophobic tabloid sensationalism about how we should fear outsiders. Bachmann himself seems to take great joy from both celebrating and challenging the range of ethnicities and belief systems present in his class – he even formulates simple methods of communication for those who don’t quite have a workable handle on the German language. The film says to us that relaxation, empathy and openness is more than enough to bridge any divides. He makes everything look very easy, and the film makes us understand what a laudable human quality that can be.

A few behind-the-scenes moments during weekends and holidays depict a more personal side to the otherwise-enigmatic Bachmann, but the picture that Speth paints of him is as someone who is casually fixated with this occupation – that the process of teaching is seeped into his very being and consumes his thoughts. When you watch him work, it’s hard not to ponder whether his sublime diplomatic skills could be put to grander use, but by then end of the film, you realise that what we’re seeing is the perfect symbiosis between a person and their chosen metier.

The knee-jerk stylistic comparison to make is to the institutional profile films of the great Frederick Wiseman, and Speth does photograph with a similar dispassionate, unobtrusive gaze. Yet the film will likely hit harder with fans of Nicolas Philibert’s 2002 film Être et Avoir, which captures a year in the life of a one-class school in the French provinces. One images that Bachmann and the inspirational teacher from that film, Georges Lopez, would have a lot to talk about.

Published 9 Dec 2022

Tags: Documentary German Cinema