There's No Escape From Technology: Antonio Campos' "Afterschool"
Posted by viceland on Friday, Mar 26, 2010
“There’s no escape. I think it’s probably getting harder to be a teenager, with all this technology continuing to grow. I don’t know, I guess we’ll only know the actual effect in 100 years.”
Antonio Campos’ creepily naturalistic style has come into its own for his first full-length film, Afterschool, which, like his first short film, Buy It Now, explores how the internet is screwing up today’s teens. It’s a stiflingly intense study of an alienated kid obsessed with watching bad stuff online.
Campos readily acknowledges the influence of Kubrick and Michael Haneke, but the claustrophobic Afterschool is unlike any other film I’ve seen. It focuses on sex, death and identity, via the eyes of a kid who views everything as if it were on camera. It’s just came out on DVD, and is a lot better than most films out at the moment. Alex Godfrey at Vice spoke to the director:
Vice: Do you think YouTube culture is really changing the way kids see the world?
Antonio Campos: I think there’s definitely an effect. The amount that people are consuming on a daily basis just continues to grow and grow, while the clips are getting shorter and shorter. One of the ideas of the film is that so much of what you’re seeing, you’re seeing from a safe difference and when these sort of things confront you in real life, you’ve already established a false perception of them in your head and the reality’s actually a lot harder to deal with.
I think there’s something to be said about the fact that most 12 or 13-year-old kids have seen hardcore porn. The things they’re seeing are so far off the reality of sex that I think there’s definitely an effect on certain kids’ perceptions. The film is dealing with someone specific who’s confused and isolated. It’s not about everybody.
I had a screening in Birmingham, and all the questions afterward were about moviemaking, then this mother in the audience got very angry and frustrated, she wanted to know what it all meant, what she should do with her 15-year-old son who she’d snuck into the screening. We talked afterward and the son was involved in the conversation but he was completely disengaged because he was logged onto Facebook and kept looking at his friends’ pictures and comments. He said he liked the film but thought the internet was a good thing. Meanwhile he couldn’t hold a conversation because there was a computer next to him. Everybody’s perception of what they’re going through is different, but there’s no denying the internet has changed the way we communicate. Teenagers’ attention spans have fundamentally changed, they’re getting shorter and shorter. They’re getting more adept at multi-tasking but what does that mean if they can’t fully pay attention to any one thing? You never really absorb anything.
What did his mom think?
Well I think the thing that scares parents is the thing that always scares parents: that they don’t know what their kids are doing. But now it’s not only that, it’s what they’re looking at and who they’re communicating with within their home. She criticized Afterschool for being sensational, although I think it’s restrained. I was really focusing on video-sharing, and the fact that kids are consuming all this stuff. But you hear of stories, for instance of people on the internet pretending to be other people. There was a story of a boy in the mid-west who created multiple Facebook accounts and identities, of girls, and managed to coerce all these guys to do sexual things for him. And there was that mother who pretended to be a boy to flirt with this girl, then turned on the girl and the girl committed suicide. This stuff is so hard to keep up with.
More at Viceland
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