![]() ![]() A Welton alumnus himself, Keating encourages his students to "make your lives extraordinary", a sentiment he summarizes with the Latin expression carpe diem ("seize the day"). On the first day of classes, the boys are surprised by the unorthodox teaching methods of new English teacher, John Keating. Assigned one of Welton's most promising students, senior Neil Perry, as his roommate, he meets Neil's friends: Knox Overstreet, Richard Cameron, Steven Meeks, Gerard Pitts, and Charlie Dalton. In 1959, Todd Anderson begins his junior year of high school at Welton Academy, an all-male preparatory boarding school in Vermont. Schulman received the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for his work. The film won the BAFTA Award for Best Film, the César Award for Best Foreign Film and the David di Donatello Award for Best Foreign Film. The film was a critical and commercial success and received numerous accolades, including Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor for Williams. ![]() The film, starring Robin Williams, is set in 1959 at the fictional elite boarding school Welton Academy, and tells the story of an English teacher who inspires his students through his teaching of poetry.ĭead Poets Society was released in the United States on June 2, 1989. The capacity for young people to find themselves and flourish is countered by the chilling potential for them to destroy themselves, or to be destroyed by a large and at times brutal world.Dead Poets Society is a 1989 American drama film directed by Peter Weir and written by Tom Schulman. Like Weir’s other film based in and around an exclusive private school, the more enigmatic Picnic at Hanging Rock, education is viewed as a pivotal but dangerous experience. As a much older adult, Dead Poets Society affects me more as a story about the qualities of inspiration itself: the potential for our words and actions to move and motivate people around us. ![]() As a high school student I remember feeling inspired by it in the obvious ways: to appreciate the creation and consumption of art, and, in my case, to continue pursuing a passion for writing. It is one of those films that means different things at different points in your life. It has grown in stature over the years, spawning a spin-off stage play and novel, as well as being a common text on school curriculums and in lists of inspirational movies, such as this from the American Film Institute. Photograph: Touchstone/Kobal/REX/Shutterstockĭead Poets Society was a hit at the box office and collected plenty of kudos – including a Bafta award for best film and an Academy award for best original screenplay (it was nominated for three others: best picture, best actor and best director). Robin Williams as the enigmatic and unconventional teacher John Keating in Dead Poets Society. But there’s a lovely synchronicity here between real-life and Keating’s objectives, given the teacher’s passion for finding ways to keep poetry relevant and exciting for younger generations. Poetry purists might turn their nose up at the idea that some people, maybe even most people, now associate Whitman’s verse first and foremost with a movie rather than a poem. There is something beautiful and yet profoundly melancholic about this cycle: poetry celebrated through film, then film celebrated through social media, with real-life tragedy and great outpourings of grief and affection at the core of it all. When, in August 2014, the hashtag #ocaptainmycaptain went viral for the first time (the film was pre-social media and so, of course, was Whitman’s poem) the context was again tragic, following the death by suicide of Williams himself. This moment takes place in the shadow of tragedy, after the heads of a conservative private school unfairly blame Keating for the suicide of one of his students. Photograph: Touchstone/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock Members of the Dead Poets Society gather. ![]()
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