page_title: The Doon School Quintet
section_title: Doon School Chronicles (2000)
hierarchical_section_title: The Doon School Quintet / Structure and themes / Doon School Chronicles (2000)
caption_attribution_description: English: Old Foot House, The Doon School
context_page_description: The Doon School Quintet is a five-part ethnographic film series made by the American visual anthropologist and documentary filmmaker David MacDougall, between 1997 and 2000, at The Doon School, an all-boys boarding school in India. For thirteen months over three years, MacDougall lived with the students and was given unprecedented access for filming inside the residential campus. By the end, MacDougall had more than 85 hours of material, which he edited into 5 parts, with a total duration of about 8 hours. The project ranks among MacDougall's most ambitious and longest works and is the only film series in his oeuvre.
  The films were released between 2000 and 2004, and are titled Doon School Chronicles, With Morning Hearts, Karam in Jaipur, The New Boys, and The Age of Reason. In addition to studying the boys' daily lives at Doon, considered the most prestigious boys' boarding school in India, the films examine the ideology and "social aesthetics" of the school, its mix of privilege and egalitarianism, and its role in Indian postcoloniality and the emergence of a new Indian elite.
context_section_description: Duration: 140 minutes
  The film is divided into ten chapters and offers an overview of various aspects of life inside the school. It covers the school's physical and social environments, hierarchies on campus, daily rituals and traditions, behaviours and mannerisms of boys of different ages, the school's visual aesthetics through material objects like uniform, furniture, utensils, classrooms and buildings. Anthropologist Anna Grimshaw has noted that "it offers both an unusually rich ethnography ... and a model for a new kind of anthropological inquiry." MacDougall focuses on the boys as well as the material culture of the school. "MacDougall brings what is often overlooked as merely the setting of cultural practice to the forefront of attention. Thus the landscape—understood as terrain, architecture, objects, shapes, textures, colors, movement, choreography, and so on—comes to be reconfigured as an active agent in, rather than a passive backdrop to, the forging of subjectivity," wrote Grimshaw.
caption: The old Foot House that features in the second film, With Morning Hearts, which focuses on the new students who live in the "holding house", before moving to the main house.
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