Movie Review: The Class

Three noncommercial movies to announce, two tonight and the usual Blank Page gallery offering Tuesday. Tonight the Wichita Association for the Motion Picture Arts and the Tallgrass Film Festival are showing a documentary about the affair of Thelonius Monk and Baroness Panonnica Rothschild de Koenigswarter - I hope you got that the first time because I'm not going to try to pronounce it again-called the The Jazz Baroness, narrated by Helen Mirren for the BBC and featuring other narrators like Sonny Rollins, Quincy Jones, Thelonius Monk Junior, Ray Haynes, Curtis Fuller, and the Dutchess of Devonshire, at 7:30 in the Warren East Theatre at 11611 East 13th. And the Orpheum is showing Star Trek, the Movie, the first one, at 7. Then come Monday, the Blank Page continues its series of French movies with Vagabond, from 1985, directed by Agnes Varda, about a woman drifter and the people show encounters and the consequences of such chance meetings; it's 3 1/2 stars in Maltin and shows at 7:30 Tuesday in the Blank Page Gallery, 917 West Douglas. And commercially we have another semidocumentary from France in The Class, maybe the best movie ever made about classroom teaching, one the board of education ought to buy and show to all incoming faculty members. Like precious few other movies, The Class sticks so strictly to the classroom and adjoining offices and playground that nobody's private life is shown, nobody's home, nobody's sweetheart; parents appear only if they come to the school to see what the problems with their kids may be. The kids are middle-school age and full of the inevitable problems, aggravated by problems of race, poverty, immigrant status, and generally unfortunate backgrounds, but none are really delinquent, and the school personnel are trying the best they can to actually educate them: there are no villains for us to blame anything on, which means we are confronted with the inevitable problems of an educational system that in some ways seems to be superior to ours. Certainly you couldn't ask for freer discussions of anything that comes up, with remarkable equality between the teacher and the students, allowing for rather minimal discipline to keep everything from collapsing into utter chaos. When things get too out of order, the students have supporters in the school personnel, and there are student representatives at meetings where I wonder whether we would allow them. The system doesn't work perfectly and outcomes are not always to my liking, but I wish I could feel that our system worked as well. I don't have much contact with our school system, so I can't say how to judge it against the situation in The Class; but it's a very convincing picture of a good system doing what it can. The teacher wrote the original book and collaborated on the screenplay and plays himself in his own enactment of his experiences in class. The director auditioned thousands of real students and school personnel-there are no professional actors-and worked improvisations with them for a whole year, and the result is a look of total authenticity. You can feel an affection for all the characters, but there are no Mr. Holland's or Dead Poets' Societies here; a catalogue of educational issues get covered, each in a relevant dramatic situation and none with a perfect, do-this-every-time solution; that's why I think everybody interested in education should see it. But The Class requires you to read subtitles. So check to see whether it will be running after tonight. Jim Erickson has been KMUW's film reviewer since 1974. Jim taught Narrative in Literature and Film at WSU from 1966 until his retirement in 1997. Jim's favorite film is Citizen Kane.