10 films for a senior high student: ‘Citizen Kane’ and ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’

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By John Anthony S. Estolloso

(Part 5 of 5)

Ending this string of cinematic recommendations are two films from the golden age of cinema: a revered classic of the silver screen and an equally treasured adaptation of a literary classic. In retrospect, ‘Citizen Kane’ and ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ were built upon the tremors of humanity’s moral fiber; but all great stories must shake the soul into an epiphany about the human self. Rather apt for November’s celebration of literature, n’est-ce pas?

Both are dated movies. Filmed in monochrome, they hold more appeal visually as anachronisms – this especially when shown to an audience caught on the fast-paced action and vibrant color of contemporary blockbusters. But what these movies lacked in special effects was more than made up by their plotlines and cinematography. After all, a good story is the core of any film – and the current mainstream industry seems to struggle with storytelling: why else would we have this endless string of remakes, sequels, prequels, spin-offs, and live-action adaptations?

Allegory turned cinematic with Citizen Kane. Incorporating the best of what cinema had to offer in its time, the film was Orson Welles’ singular magnum opus of 1941. Storytelling, set design, cinematography, scoring – Kane had it all. The film as fictional portrait metaphorized the twisted tides and turns of human nature, where both hubris and hamartia devour the eponymous character even as he wallows in his treasure-hoards, desolate and abandoned by the rest of the world. It was biography doubling as cautionary tale.

Welles was a genius of his time: giant of the stage and screen, master storyteller, and eccentric personality all combined. As director, producer, and main character of the film, he embodied Kane – a megalomaniac entity whose pursuit of power, prestige, and popularity consumes him and drives him to destroy everything he built. Ambition to a vile magnitude gave him a worldly empire, which degenerates into his prison: Xanadu as Platonic nirvana turns into a wasteland of nostalgia, holding the key to the verbal leitmotif ‘Rosebud’, the only word perhaps that gave Kane some figment of humanity. Watch the film to understand the depth of the narrative.

Robert Mulligan’s 1962 adaptation of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird dealt with a different face of corruption, one protected by systemic discrimination and a twisted legal system. Courting controversy and criticism in their own time, both novel and film elevated the issue of racism and the corollary civil rights movement as literature. Transformed as a contested aesthetic space, the plot underlined the historic rumblings on which the characters’ experiences were anchored, turning the narrative as social and political commentary: small wonder why the film was included by the US Library of Congress in the National Film Registry.

Years ago, my Grade 9 students were required to view the film as complementary activity accompanying the reading of the novel in English class. While there were skeptical eyebrows raised when the opening credits reveal the austere color palette of the film, and the first fifteen minutes of reel took on a languid pace of dialogue, they nonetheless got hooked with the courtroom scene: dapper Gregory Peck, with his nonchalant lawyer’s air, proceeds point by point to defend a negro in an Alabama courthouse. While all substantial evidence points to the innocence of the black defendant, the verdict says otherwise – and that drives home the point of the film. One needs to be in the classroom to savor fully the stunned disbelief and teary outrage of students in a WTF moment.

And at the risk of taking on a moralistic tone, they are right to be outraged: they should be. When injustice and discrimination thrive in our institutionalize prejudices, when greed and ambition become terrible leviathans devouring the soul that fosters them, then provocation to some sort of response becomes a categorical imperative. For whatever it is worth, students must recognize these unpleasant realities of human nature, even just through cinema.

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Great films ought to provoke and inspire viewers: the permanence of the cinema’s medium transforms the ordinary theatrical experience of drama as total work of art into something that can be revisited time and again, even as it goes through a deepening of the maturing viewer’s appreciation of the narrative. Whether as allegory or commentary, visual narratives hold on to the Timeless and the Universal, those ideas, values, and images embedded and shared in our collective unconscious. Thusly, to paraphrase Whitman, the powerful play goes on onscreen – and it will always do so.

(The writer is a language and literature teacher in one of the private schools in the city. The posters are from Wikimedia Commons.)