Can you guess where we are in our film class adventure? Here's a hint:
Then, as it must to all men, death came to Charles Foster Kane.
That's right, the obligatory screening of Citizen Kane, without which no film survey course is complete. There's so much going on in that movie that the kiddies can press the full breadth of their new vocabularies into service, which is nice. But it also allows us to get into a discussion of auteurism, which will segue neatly into next week's Hitchcock flick. So in addition to the textbook reading, I assigned a Bazin article and discussed ol' Andrew Sarris.
And I do mean old. Over at the Reeler, Stu has caught the father of American auteur theory cadging his column copy for the Observer almost verbatim from Film Forum's program notes. Tacky! The students are sometimes budding plagiarists themselves and don't need encouragement still so innocent that the cinetrix didn't mention it in class. However, I did invoke the Sarris-Kael feuds of yore as an explanation of why Pauline went to such lengths to nominate screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz as the real auteur of Kane.
Did the kids like the movie? Who can say? Does it matter? Here are some proud pedogogic moments:
- Having a student know the story behind "Rosebud," so I didn't have to explain it. [Gore Vidal does a bang-up job of discussing it here that's worth reading.]
- Drawing an elaborate diagram of the plot on the board, inspired by Mulvey's bfi monograph on Kane. [Go figure.]
- Playing this clever You Tube video for No. 1 Welles fan Jack White's White Stripes song "The Union Forever," which illustrates the cultural resonance of the film and Orson Welles even today. No, really. [Remember, they're too young to know about Paul Masson. Or even The Critic.]
