Marissa Horning

English 102

Mrs. Meissner

February 8, 2019

Analysis of ​The First Year: Following Five Young Teachers

Introduction

A teacher’s job is overwhelming - they must work with students all day, deal with

reassuring parents that their children are making progress, and sometimes deal with the

repercussions when those parents’ expectations are not met. While it is the students’

responsibility to advocate for themselves, teachers take on the difficult task of helping every

student who enters their classroom, including the ones who do not want to be helped. This

concept of shared responsibility, as well as the emotional difficulty of a teacher’s job is explored

in the 2001 documentary film, ​The First Year - Following Five Young Teachers​, directed by

Davis Guggenheim. As the documentary's title suggests, this film follows the first school year of

five teachers: special education instructor Georgene Acosta, senior high teacher Joy Kraft,

elementary teacher Nate Monely, middle school teacher Genevieve DeBose, and kindergarten

teacher Maurice Rabb. This documentary attempts to capture both their struggles and their

triumphs while working with the students they are tasked with educating their first year on the

job.
Mise-en-scene Analysis

“Mise en scène helps create a sense of place, a sense of character, a mood” (McGrail).

The elements of mise-en-scene in ​The First Year ​are intended to make the viewer feel as though

they are experiencing all of the same things as the documentary subjects, which is an essential

part of the documentary’s voice. According to the third chapter of Bill Nichols’ ​Introduction to

Documentary​, documentaries “are a representation of the world” rather than a “reproduction of

reality,” giving them a unique voice. This means that Guggenheim is trying to convince the

audience that the first year of a teacher’s career is how he portrays it. In order to capture the year

most effectively, Guggenheim chose to use hand-held cameras rather than those on tripods or

dollies for most of the film, also primarily using natural lighting to frame the shots of both the

children and teachers at school. His goal is to show that the teacher shortage and problems with

teacher retention, especially after the first year, are due in part to the emotionally draining

situations the teachers encounter with their students every day.

The smoothness and fluidity of a camera that is held on a tripod or a dolly is forgone;

instead, Guggenheim chooses to rely upon the hand-held approach.

This means that the camera angles are not always consistent, and the

shots of people’s movements are often shaky, as the camera moves

with the cameraman. This is shown in the series of images to the left.

All three of these stills from the documentary were captured within a

ten second time period, and it is apparent, even in this short amount of

time, that the camera angle changes and the height of the camera is not
remaining consistent. In the past, this approach to filming was seen as inferior or

​ ebsite, but in this instance,

Guggenheim may have chosen this style of filming as a way to bring the viewer closer to the

action of the film. Yale also says that this style gives “a greater feeling of sponteneity [sic].”

With the hand-held approach, viewers would be more likely to really feel as though they are at

the park with the kindergarten teacher pictured, Maurice Rabb.

The choices made by Guggenheim about the lighting in the documentary are also

significant; almost every shot in the film is lit by natural means. This means that, instead of using

fluorescent bulbs or other types of artificial light brought in by the filmmakers, Guggenheim

decided to let the sunlight or the lights already existing in the

homes of the teachers be the background for the film. The stills

captured from the documentary shown on the right are examples

of this. The first is an image of high school social studies teacher

Joy Craft getting ready for school in the morning, her room

obviously being lit by a lamp on the bedside table. While the light

in this image is not necessarily “natural,” it can still be considered

as such because the lighting may not have been explicitly staged

by the filmmakers. The second and third stills are obviously lit by

sunlight, the first through a window in a classroom, and the

second showing a sunrise as elementary teacher Nate Monely

walks across the street. This use of natural lighting as opposed to artificial lighting adds to the

authenticity of the film, furthering the viewer’s experience in following the teachers.
Documentary Analysis

The purpose of this documentary is to communicate to the viewer that it takes a special

kind of person to be a teacher, because of the investment that teachers must necessarily make

into their students and the emotional toll that such an investment can take. In ​The First Year​,

Guggenheim follows these five teachers, Georgene Acosta, Joy Kraft, Nate Monely, Genevieve

DeBose, and Maurice Rabb, because their individual classrooms and student age groups provide

the viewer with unique perspectives on the relationship between teacher and student. Throughout

the film, Guggenheim uses several methods to engage the viewer and enhance the emotional

attachment between the audience and the teachers documented onscreen. This demonstrates why

teaching can be such a difficult job much more effectively than an analysis of statistics like

wages, politics, and job openings could.

Communicating all that goes into a year of school for a teacher, as well as cutting it down

into a film of reasonable length is no easy task. There were several aspects of the teachers’ first

year that were intentionally not put into the film, such as their

interactions with other teachers or how they planned their lessons.

These possible scenes, along with many others, were most likely

left out or replaced with other situations because they did not

contribute as greatly to the emotion of the film. Instead, the

documentary included several emotional scenes as teachers

realized their own limitations in the education system. The images

on the left are an example of such a scene. In the first shot,

project, in which he is participating enthusiastically. The second shot shows DeBose driving

Marvin home, accompanied by cheerful music, denoting a happy mood. However, the caption on

the final shot appears with melancholy music, because DeBose will no longer be allowed to

teach Marvin. Spending less time on the aforementioned types of scenes and more time on

scenes like the one containing the shots on the left is a strategy Guggenheim used to strengthen

his argument.

Another strategy used by Guggenheim is his choice to include a series

of black-and-white images at the end of the documentary, showing the

film’s subjects after their first year of teaching and what they went on

to do. In sharp contrast to the rest of the film, this section of the

documentary is not in color and is overlaid by a woman giving

commentary on their future plans. This increases the emotional impact

of the film, because not all of the teachers decided to continue teaching

after their first year - a sad fact that is emphasized by the difference

from the color and vibrancy of the main film.

In this documentary, Guggenheim digs deeply into the emotional toll that is taken on

these teachers when they encounter students who are in bad situations, like Genevieve’s

experience with Marvin, or those who may need extra help in order to succeed, like Maurice’s

situation regarding Tyquan. He does not just focus on the financial or political pressures put

upon teachers in order to explain why so many choose to leave after their first year. Focusing on

such individualized parts of a teacher's experience could be seen as a risky decision, because not
every viewer will be able to relate personally to the things they are seeing on the screen.

Guggenheim chooses to do this anyway in order to make the documentary more emotionally

impacting. The financial and political difficulties of a teacher's job may be more relatable to the

majority, but these personal interactions with students are just as important, if not more, to the

documentary’s point.
 Works Cited

The First Year.​ Dir. Davis Guggenheim. Teachers Documentary Project, 2001. Kanopy. Web. 5

Feb. 2019.

Nichols, Bill. “Chapter 3: What Gives Documentary Films a Voice of Their Own?” ​Introduction

to Documentary,​ by Bill Nichols, Indiana University Press, 2017, pp. 42–60.

McGrail, Lauren. “5 Essential Elements of Successful Mise En Scène in Film.” ​Lights Film

School,​ 3 July 2018, www.lightsfilmschool.com/blog/mise-en-scene-in-film-afk.

Yale University. “Part 3: Cinematography.” ​Film Analysis​,

filmanalysis.coursepress.yale.edu/cinematography/.