A Touch of Greatness

A TOUCH OF GREATNESS (2004) is a bolt of lightning disguised as a documentary. Director Leslie Sullivan and producer Catherine Gund train their lens on Albert Cullum, a force-of-nature elementary school teacher who blew the roof off Rye, New York public schools by handing Shakespeare, Sophocles, and Whitman directly to seven-year-olds and compelling them to feel it.

The film's secret weapon is its ravishing, grain-soaked 16mm black-and-white film shot in 1964 by the legendary Robert Downey Sr.; images so alive and strange they feel like they were smuggled out of another dimension. Children declaiming, performing, weeping, laughing. A classroom that looks like a theater, a church, a fever dream.

Woven through the archival material are TV broadcast fragments from the era and deeply emotional contemporary interviews with Cullum himself and the now-grown, devoted students (and some of their parents!) whose lives he permanently altered. Together they make the case that one radical, wildly imaginative teacher is an act of historical consequence.

This is what education looks like when someone refuses to be ordinary.

Independent Lens broadcast A TOUCH OF GREATNESS to thunderous acclaim, earning the film an Emmy nomination for Best Documentary and cementing its place in the conversation about what American education could be, if we only could imagine.

It opened the Margaret Mead Film Festival, chosen above all others to set the tone for a celebration of documentary filmmaking at its most urgent and alive.

And then USA Today said the quiet part loud. In a remarkable editorial titled "'Greatness' in the Classroom," the paper's verdict was simple and incendiary: "If I were secretary of education... I'd simply log onto Amazon.com, order 3.5 million copies of the new documentary A Touch of Greatness and send them to every teacher, principal and PTA president in the United States. If that didn't do the trick, I don't know what would."

Three and a half million copies. Every classroom in America. That's not a review. That's a prescription. Twenty-two years ago, the film was vital. Today, it feels less like a document of the past than a dare to the present.