Back to School

BFI | Sight & Sound | Back to School

As the final Harry Potter book approaches its publication date we still await a truly inventive screen treatment of the series. Of the four Potter films so far, only Alfonso Cuarón's Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) manages to evoke the surreal melange of Mervyn Peake, C.S. Lewis, Enid Blyton and Anthony Buckeridge that informs J.K. Rowling's vision of Hogwarts and its denizens. The Harry Potter films are the most commercially successful entries in the time-honoured British boarding-school genre. From the 1930s onwards, the stock scenario was comfortingly routine: an exploration of how our hero, a potentially recalcitrant individual, could be brought to accept the wisdom of a traditional value system. And for all their CGI wizardry, it is to this system that the Potter films have wholeheartedly returned - as though Lindsay Anderson's system-smashing If.... (1968) had never been made. The Hogwarts world of midnight escapades, school sports, rival houses and a wise headmaster surrounded by Malvolio-like teachers is familiar to anyone who has seen the boarding-school films of the 1930s, 1940s or 1950s.



BBC News | EDUCATION | Harry Potter makes boarding fashionable

Harry Potter has become the acceptable face of modern boarding schools.
According to the Boarding Education Alliance, the best-selling stories of the boy who lives in an exciting school for wizards, have helped to re-invent the image of boarding schools.
"The books have probably done more for boarding than anything else we could have imagined," says Ann Williamson, campaign director of the BEA, which represents 170 boarding schools". The Harry Potter books, which have sold in large numbers in the United States and the United Kingdom, are set in an adventure-filled boarding school where pupils learn magic and play games on broomsticks. And Ann Williamson believes that the favourable publicity from the Potter series has contributed to the "levelling off" of the long-term decline in boarding.