Cultural comparison

Project Muse

Bulman convincingly demonstrates that high school films are not about schooling, rather they are social settings where identity issues, rite of passage and the grand drama of adolescence is played out. Would it then not have been better to reframe the study to address these broader themes? A reframing together with a discussion of the translatability of the high school genre to non-American films would have better suited the comparative dimension of the study and the
inclusion of 41 foreign films, not all of which relate to high school we learn as few foreign films were to be found that could be categorized as ‘high school films.’ The question then arises if the high school film is an American genre, does it lend itself to cross-cultural comparison?