Member review

High school teachers often make a lasting impression. No student of this film's central character - Rainer Wenger - could forget him in a hurry. Based on a true story from a Californian high school in 1967, the teacher attempts to explain the meaning of "autocracy" to his class during project week by teaching in an authoritarian manner. Rainer is a popular lefty teacher who, sporting a different punk band T-shirt for every day of the week, strives to break with the stuffy teaching methods of some of his colleagues. Making the class march on the spot, he implores them to make the ceiling below collapse on the "anarchy" class being taught by his teaching nemesis. These methods capture the imagination of the class, and they soon adopt a uniform, of white shirt and jeans, and develop a salute although no clear political aim is ever alluded to.