One of the many ways the United States differs from many of our peer countries is that we don’t have a national school curriculum. Another is that the schools in a given area are typically governed by an elected school board, members of which may have no background or expertise in education. Most funding for K-12 education also comes from local taxes, which means that some schools are much better funded than others. While the American system is designed to give local residents a great deal of control over the schools in their district, it also means that school board races can be more about politics than education, and those politics may be based on religious beliefs, misinformation, and emotional reactions more than on knowledge of how education works.
Auberi Edler’s documentary An American Pastoral observes the months leading up to a school board election in the borough of Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, whose sprawling development is underlined by an opening sequence following a school bus down a two-lane highway past farms and fields and suburban-style homes. It’s a mostly white, mostly conservative area and in March 2023, when the film begins, all nine school board members are currently Republicans. There’s Republicans and then there’s Republicans, however, and five members of the Board are moderates while four are far right. The upcoming election is of particular interests because all five of the seats held by moderates are up for election, and flipping a single seat would give the radicals control.
Edler, a native of France, allows her camera to observe the process without inserting herself into the story, except of course that this is the kind of film that’s made in the editing suite (Edler did her own cinematography, while Barbara Bascou served as the editor). She doesn’t use chyrons to identify people or locations but lets the story emerge from innumerable town meetings, religious services, high school classes, and other ordinary small-town locations, creating a portrait of the borough and its residents that provides context for the election and the issues of concern. Despite sometimes fundamental disagreements, people’s interactions seem to be governed mostly by the kind of “nice” also credited to, among other places, Missouri and Minnesota.
Anyone who has lived in one of those places knows that superficial niceness can often disguise extreme and unyielding opinions, and such is the case in An American Pastoral. Accusations are repeated without understanding—one parent is convinced that students are being taught critical race theory because students are assigned to read To Kill a Mockingbird in English class—and many people seem more concerned with hot-button issues (one elderly gentlemen is very clear that there are two, and only two, possible genders) than with students being educated for the future they’re going to face. And then there’s the copies of A Streetcar Named Desire that had to be replaced because a parent objected to the cover, which featured a shirtless Marlon Brando (honestly, you’d think that might be a good draw to get students to actually read the play).
If you follow American politics, there’s not much in An American Pastoral that you will find surprising (although the I must admit that The 1607 Project was new to me). Still, it’s useful to have this story documented and put into a convenient package (Edler won the IDFA award for Best Directing at the 2024 International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam). To people outside the United States, it may be quite eye-opening, however, and I couldn’t blame anyone for wondering, on the strength of this documentary alone, if Americans have lost their collective minds. | Sarah Boslaugh
An American Pastoral is distributed by Film Movement and is available through many VOD and digital platforms.
