Stop neglecting America's artistic heritage

Notes from Underground

By: Adam Roberts

Posted: 12/1/08

Imagine growing up in Rome and never visiting the Sistine Chapel, or living in Russia and never hearing anything by Tchaikovsky. That's exactly the situation many Americans are in now.

Most of you reading this have never seen "Citizen Kane." Orson Welles' 1941 fictional biopic about media magnate Charles Foster Kane is widely regarded as the greatest movie ever made. There's a very good case that it's the greatest artistic achievement that this country has ever produced.

And yet, I keep meeting people who don't even recognize the title.

This is bizarre because film is the one medium that Americans should be the most familiar with.

Two thousand years from now, people will remember exactly three things about the United States of America: the Declaration of Independence, World War II and Hollywood.

Moving pictures, whether projected at a theater, broadcast over the airwaves or streamed across the Internet, have been the dominant form of art for more than a century, and there's no sign of that changing. Film is to the modern West what architecture is to Ancient Greece, or painting is to the Renaissance. "America" and "Hollywood" are synonymous terms in most of the world.

Everyone who graduates high school is expected to have read "Hamlet," listened to Beethoven and seen a copy of the "Mona Lisa." They're essential parts of our cultural heritage. You simply can't function in the Western world without being at least somewhat familiar with these masterpieces.

But somewhere along the way, film has been left behind.

Think of all the missed opportunities. Instead of using the Winona Ryder version of "The Crucible" to teach us about McCarthyism, my history teacher should have showed us "High Noon." "The Godfather" or "Modern Times" would have taught us about American history in a much more vivid and memorable way than reading assignments did.

In English, I'm sure we could have used at least one of the 20 class periods we spent memorizing lines from "Romeo and Juliet" to watch "To Kill a Mockingbird" instead. Why did Arthur Miller get four weeks, while John Ford and Stanley Kubrick got none?

In humanities class, we watched some awful biopic about Beethoven's love life instead of doing something useful, like screening "2001: A Space Odyssey."

But, if there's only room in the curriculum for one cinematic masterpiece, "Citizen Kane" is the one to choose. Apart from its grammatical and technical importance, "Kane" is a story that could only be told in America. It is a story about the American Dream - money, meritocracy, media, materialism - and its failure to satisfy.

Sixty-seven years later, uniquely American figures like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Jackson and Bill Gates are best explained by pointing toward Charles Foster Kane. The original title of the screenplay of "Citizen Kane"? "The American."

It's been suggested to me that many people might avoid seeing "Citizen Kane" precisely because of its accolades. There's something a bit stuffy about renting a film practically subtitled "The Greatest Movie of All Time."

This is understandable.

"Hamlet" is much more boring when your teacher assigns you a five-page paper about it than it would be if you just happened to stumble across it at the bookstore.

This is also unfortunate.

"Kane" is far from boring. Set up as a mystery story, we learn the details of Charles Foster Kane's rise from virtually nothing, his role in starting a war, his run for governor, his love affairs and ultimately his collapse under his own power.

"Kane" features a fantastic cast, headed by Welles himself, who directed the film - his first - at age 24. "Kane" essentially codified film grammar and pioneered techniques of focus and editing. It created a new style of filmmaking that fundamentally changed every piece of cinema made afterward.

However, the movie is easily accessible to all audiences, not just to film buffs. Two hours spent watching an essential classic is not too much to ask of high school graduates.

If you want to know anything about America, you have to know about movies. And if you want to know anything about movies, you have to see "Citizen Kane."

Adam Roberts is a columnist for The Arkansas Traveler. His column appears every Monday.