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Films depicting educational relationships typically emphasize personal connections between students and teachers over the educational goals that such relations facilitate. In doing so, these films raise the question of how teachers stand in relation to their institutional roles in such a way as to inspire students' desires for knowledge. In this paper, in order to examine the influence of institutional roles in defining teacher-student relationships, we analyze ''The Paper Chase,'' a film in which teacher and student have no personal connection but in which the drama of student desire is nonetheless clearly featured. Drawing from Plato's erotics, in which the soul is shaped by desire for that which it lacks, and from Jacques Lacan's theories of desire and transference, we argue that ''The Paper Chase'' portrays educational desire as rooted in the differential of authority between teacher and student.Keywords Film Á Desire Á Pedagogical relation Á Plato Á Lacan Á Transference Scholars analyzing the teacher-student relationship as portrayed in popular media (Dalton 2004;Keroes 1999) invariably focus their attention on To Sir, with Love (Clavell 1967). The film's appeal draws from its emphasis on teacher-student relations: little formal schooling takes place despite its educational setting and characters. As in the many films that follow its lead, To Sir, with Love replaces the ''three R's'' with romance and transforms the task of education into an interpersonal exchange of beliefs and tastes. 1 The popularity of To Sir, with Love, as well as the regular repetition of its character types and J. Stillwaggon (

From Socrates to Jean Brodie, we have become accustomed to teachers serving as placeholders for transgressive and powerful desires in our cultural imaginary. Evidenced by recent scholarship on teachers in film, however, as well as by the 2006 film Notes on a Scandal, the way we ought to feel about teachers acting on their transgressive motivations, realizing the cultural fantasies that shadow desire and break from social norms, is less clear. In this article James Stillwaggon and David Jelinek frame the problematic erotics of school films in terms of the fantasy of the subject presumed to know and the transgressive bliss of jouissance. Stillwaggon and Jelinek analyze Notes on a Scandal as a breakdown and reversal of the tradition of school films to which it is indebted and work from it toward an understanding of the unrecognized and often conflicted cultural commitments that shape teaching.

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