Can We Teach Film at Classical Schools, Please?

I’ve spent most of my professional career as a Latin teacher. I grew up in the classical education homeschool movement reciting “Amo, Amas, Amat” and I’ve taught numerous of my own students to do the same. I believe that classical education changes lives because I’ve seen it. It’s the last, best hope we have for education in this country.

But growing up inside a movement gives you eyes to find all the room for improvement. And after years inside classical ed conferences and scope & sequence meetings, I think we have an issue. 

As a rule, classical schools don’t teach Film and that’s a big problem.

I’ve frequently seen movies included as a tool to supplement history or literature classes, as a visual aid. But I mean something bigger than that. I mean study of film history, artistry, and meaning itself, beginning with Muybridge’s racing horse and Georges Melies’s magic Trip to the Moon, through the golden age of screwball comedy, film noir, and biblical epics. I know plenty of schools that show To Kill a Mockingbird after reading the novel. I don't know any that require Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid. 

If we believed that classical education means that “older is better,” this would make sense. But classical education is about more than that: it’s a way of living and rearing children to live. In the words of David Hicks, “Classical education is not, preeminently, of a specific time or place. It stands instead for a spirit of inquiry and a form of instruction concerned with the development of style through language and of conscience through myth.” (Norms & Nobility 18) Despite this, nearly every classical conference I attend has a keynote speaker who asserts that we - the unenlightened modern populace - are fond of films due to our own bastardized education.

This inaccurate generalization does an active disservice to our students, and not just from the perspective of cultural literacy. Much of Beauty and Truth in the American arts has been expressed in film. Disregarding this study only further divorces our students from the American tradition and the broader Western tradition. Take it from a classics major: Aaron Sorkin has more in common with Plato than we give either credit for.

But I just don’t think that luddite is the same thing as classical - and conveniently, neither do those who call the shots at my charter school. Partly because I am an incurable film-buff, we offered a Film class this year at our classical high school. If you’re not too scandalized yet, take a look at a few reasons I’ve found that every classical school should do so:

1. Film teaches students to mourn lost things 

To be a student of the classics is to live with a grief that never goes away. You fall in love with the syntax of a language that is dead. You aren’t waiting for the latest release of your favorite author because he died in 19 BC before he could edit his magnum opus, The Aeneid. Even the author of his best fanfiction, Dante, has long since passed from the living.

This is the sad lesson every student of the classics knows: history is cruel to the works of men. Our libraries are burned down by illiterate armies in a drunken rage (here’s looking at you, Caesar). Even more are lost to the sheer carelessness of human beings. The Greek playwright Euripides has at least 60 plays of which we have either small fragments or only second-hand. The “Oedipus Cycle”- three plays which are often read together - is three separate plays that were never intended to go together; their companions have been lost. What I would give to get my hands on a copy of Aristotle’s second book of the Poetics – that one was on comedy.

This unique grief is shared by the film buff, for history has not been kind to film classics either. 

Like the Greek plays, countless older films have decayed or been destroyed by war and just plain carelessness. Sometimes we are left with a single film still of a haunting moment, or a brief description of the plot. Dozens of Mary Pickford’s early silent films have been lost forever. Erich Von Stroheim’s epic, nine-hour masterpiece Greed was edited to mutilation by his studio, the original gone for keeps. Occasionally, as with The Passion of Jeanne D’Arc, we are blessed by the gods and discover one tucked away in a medical supply closet.

Martin Scorsese made the finest ode to this kind of grief in his masterpiece Hugo. In the film, Georges Melies - the magician who has bitterly abandoned his art form - tells the young orphan Hugo how he was forced to burn his own films for rubber during World War I. Scorsese, himself something of a magician, tells us the story with joy for the works which survived and melancholy for those which have not. We learn to see the magnificence of this filmmaker’s life through the weight of everything that has not survived.

Students who learn to love the beauty of silent films share in the tragic loss of thousands of works of literature to decay, time, and negligence. And doesn’t a successful education teach us to mourn for the right things?

2. Film is part of the Western mythos

In Norms & Nobility, trailblazer David Hicks refers to the inherent “collision” between the seemingly opposed mythos and logos. He continues that “myths provide each member of society with something to dignify and lend coherence to his life, as well as with something of quality he can share with the other members of his community.” (Norms & Nobility 30)

More has been written on the topic of myths by other, better writers than myself. But if we use Hicks’s overview as our definition, we can see a place for some of the great works of cinema. Hicks continues: 

The mythos is the very skeleton of civilization…Myths, like the panegyrics at a Roman funeral, remind man to think and act out of a sense of responsibility toward the past. Those who forget the past are bound to be condemned to repeat its mistakes ad infinitum. Myths inspire men to perform great and selfless deeds by assuring and warning them that their actions are not individual, but symbolic. Their actions and ideas have never-ending consequences…The student of myths is likewise transformed by participating in them through his imagination. The myth involves and commits him, civilizes him, stamps him. Its transcendent nature, paradoxically, grounds the student in time while animating his soul. (Norms & Nobility 31)

Take, for example, the great American myth about the ordinary man in Frank Capra’s classic It’s a Wonderful Life. We meet George Bailey, a man who longs to achieve great things but cannot escape his responsibilities at home. But when he eventually wishes he had never been born, he is literally given the chance to imagine a world without him in it. The consequence of every small decision is played out, and he sees that his life has been full of meaning and adventures - just not the ones he wanted.

Such a story needs to be shared and repeated, to become part of the imaginative furniture in a child’s brain. It is one of the strands which binds our identity together - and its loss will have disastrous consequences on our culture.

In a class of eleven classically educated students, only three had seen this film, none recently enough to recall its contents. But now, on the days when I am weighed down, my students will correct me with a grin, “Just remember, Miss. It is a wonderful life.” It has become part of our shared sense of ourselves, and has entered our common vocabulary. That’s where it belongs.

3. Film asks normative questions

Not all films are mythic, however, and other films also have an important place in the pursuit of a classical education. Film study, done classically, must learn much from Hicks’s description of the study of literature. “Literature as paideia,” writes Hicks, “does not necessarily change the fact or meaning of what is written, but it does alter the spirit in which the student pursues his studies and shapes the questions with which he confronts his reading. These questions are what we call normative - and analysis serves them, not itself.” (Norms & Nobility 100)

Those are the kinds of conversations we have in my Film class every day. What kinds of love do we see in Casablanca? According to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, does gold corrupt the hearts of men or are they corrupt from the start? Was Citizen Kane a good or bad man?

These questions are not artificially placed in front of students. They arise naturally through the imaginative work of the story. The truly classic films address the same questions as the classics of the Western literary canon. We wonder what is the Good? What is man? Even, how can man know God?

Many of these conversations are deeper after the formal study of film. Students learn story structure and characterization because understanding these things teaches them how we interpret reality. The significance of Shane chopping at the impossible stump with his new friend Starett has more meaning when a student learns how it prefigures his stand against the murderous cowman Ryker. The madcap events of Bringing Up Baby matter more when you learn to discern the inner motivations that drive outer actions.

And this is not just true of old films. My students responded equally well to The Artist (2011)  and The General (1926). One of our best class discussions about the nature of love, and the things we do for it, followed the magnificent short film: The Silent Child (2017). Isn’t that part of the goal? I don’t just want them to be black-and-white junkies. I want them to go to the movies on the weekend and think, really think about what they watched.

Whether it’s an old classic or a newer film, sometimes grappling with these things will be hard. Gone with the Wind paints an ugly but honest picture of the past. Rebel Without a Cause asks difficult questions with answers that are hard to discern. But facing up to such questions is the kind of hard work that civilized men do.

4. Film is beautiful.

Ultimately though, the most important reason to teach film is simply because it is beautiful. Stratford Caldecott says in Beauty for Truth’s Sake:

The principle is the same: knowledge is its own end - “worth possessing for what it is, and not merely for what it does.” It is not to be valued for the power it gives us over nature, or even for the moral improvement it may bring about in us (even if these things may flow from it). It is to be valued for its beauty. (Beauty for Truth’s Sake 28)

Movies are not a means to an end (at least, many of them aren’t) and the tendency of classical educators to speak of them as such undermines the work we are about. 

It’s like Charlie Chaplin’s heartbreaking film, which every person without exception should watch and rewatch - The Kid. As Chaplin’s comedic persona, the Tramp, comes to adopt a young orphan, his heart is tamed from its rascally ways. The lost become found, the broken become whole, all while having a few laughs along the way.

For many of my students, this one is still their favorite film of the whole course so far. When I ask them why, they say, “The Kid is just…it’s just so good.” It is Good, in the way of beautiful things. 

Don’t study film for the other real, but lesser reasons. Study film with your students because it is beautiful and beautiful things are worthwhile for themselves.

***

Where will we find the time for all this, you might ask? I don’t know, for there is never world enough or time. What I do believe is that we must find the time and seize it. Carpe diem.

Studying film at a classical school is a microcosm of what we are trying to do in classical schools. If the classical view of man - the way he learns, the way he sins, and the way he loves - is true, it will be true in the movies. A truly classical school must rise to the challenge.

Let me give you a little picture of what happens when we do.

My film class finished the 1930 classic All Quiet on the Western Front last semester right before the new Netflix adaptation was released. There’s nothing like that haunting final image of the 1930 version - a lifeless hand outstretched into no man’s land towards a flitting butterfly. No blood, no gore, only pure heartbreak at the brokenness of human nature.

I didn’t assign the new adaptation, but many of my students watched it at home on their own time. Inevitably, we compared the two adaptations. All of them have read Remarque’s novel in their 7th grade history class, so the story isn’t new. We discussed differences between the films, and which was closer to the book. To my surprise, most preferred the older film. 

“The thing is, ” one boy commented, “The new film showed more from the book, but somehow it meant less.” Three months previously, this student’s favorite film was The Purge. Through the study of film, his heart is being attuned to something outside film ratings and jump scares - the meanings of things and our relation to them. It’s one of the marks of a classically educated man.

So if you are already planning what next year will look like, I’d like to put in my bid early. Find a way to teach Film to your students. You won’t regret it.