Editor’s Note

There are some special teachers who effortlessly inspire their students.We remember these enthusiastic, charming, charismatic souls from our school and university days as being the rare flaming angelfish in a sea of grey mullets. Like the Robin Williams character John Keating in the film Dead Poets Society, they make the lessons, setworks and even the exams and essays we have to write come alive.

They make it a joy to learn about their subject. We tend to have only a few of these teachers in our school/varsity careers. For me, one of them was Prof John van Zyl, the head of media studies at the University of the Witwatersrand for 20 years. He delivered, or should I say performed, my Drama and Film course lectures.

I’ve always loved movies — my extended family had a tradition of going to the five o’clock show of the new release every Friday afternoon in the cinema — but it was Prof Van Zyl who made the medium come alive with his vibrant talks about symbolism, visual literacy, plot, nuance and direction. He had a lot with which to work his magic

— a vast, inexhaustible, interesting, universal and glamorous subject.

I found it serendipitous then that last week, a few days before the 96th Academy Awards ceremony today, I received an e-mail from a reader wanting to give away her vast library of film books. When I went to pick them up from her house, it transpired that I’d grown up with her sons (also film buffs) and that she also knew Van Zyl from his film reviews in The Star newspaper.

Sometimes the threads of life seem to tangle and intertwine like a good film plot. In this particular story I was the blonde in the red sports car.