Last Look

Since 1970, when I offered the first courses in film studies at the University, my primary pedagogical goal has been visual thinking: encouraging students to
focus on the formal elements of film and how these elements convey narrative, psychology, thematics.

In a small, undergraduate seminar that year we undertook an intensive analysis of several international films — provocative, innovative, demanding. One of the most enthusiastically received was Jean-Luc Godard’s “Weekend” (1967). Students took in their stride the outpouring of cultural and political references, the dynamic and protean stylistics, Godard’s new and audacious way of “doing” film.

They felt as strongly as I that film was the most vibrant 20th-century art  form. Intoxicated by the medium, we wanted to explore its possibilities together, spellbound in darkness, in front of the large screen, luminous, with beautifully defined, high-resolution images.

The ’70s were a time of febrile collective exploration of world cinema. The communal experience was an essential part of the Gestalt, of the “cinema situation.” With so many 16mm film series in Wilson, Newcomb and Gilmer, students could see at least one movie a night, and somehow we found the funding for mini-“festivals,” screening the work of important filmmakers who would visit, speak after the shows and visit classes. Frank Capra took up residence at the Colonnade Club for the better part of a week; Al Maysles visited for informal workshops in documentary; Robert Altman took a weekend off from editing “Nashville” to address an overflow Saturday night crowd in Old Cabell Hall. Heady times, indeed.

I was reminded of all this a few months ago when an undergraduate dropped by to chat about an interdisciplinary University major in film studies. As we explored the course offering directory for spring 2007, I noticed that there were around 25 courses in film being offered in media studies, drama, English, studio art, history, sociology, American studies, psychology, music and virtually all the foreign language departments. The proliferation of courses over the years was to be expected, and, given the interdisciplinary nature of the field, its moving out from a small core of departments in the first decade to such a broad range of programs and departments was not surprising.

In addition to courses in the history of cinema and film theory/aesthetics, the offerings centered on sociocultural analysis, gender, production, novel and film, economic developments and spectatorship.

What presents a challenge to sustained critical analysis of films today are the ways in which we watch movies. Students grow up in a world of multimedia images of which film is just one example. With the advent of digital technologies, the traditional object of study — the chemical process of photography, the celluloid strips of images — has been altered. We routinely watch films on numerous kinds of “screens” in diverse formats, in varied venues and contexts. These technologies offer ready accessibility to filmic texts, albeit in modified formats, and with a quality of image resolution often inferior to that of motion-picture film.

Given the universal availability of films, the smaller screens on which they are watched and the stop-and-go control that the watcher exercises over the film, what was a vexation with videocassettes has become much more problematic: A film has become less an experience than an object, to be placed in a home-viewing apparatus or accessed on a computer and looked at in a casual, often piecemeal, manner. Paradoxically, as we watch more movies on video screens and computers, our patterns of looking often decrease visibility.

In recent years, students, wired seemingly from the cradle to the benighted mindset of multitasking, do a great deal of looking but see less and consequently need, more than ever, a rigorous grounding in thinking visually about films as coherent, unified artistic experiences. And a powerful aid to such grounding is provided by watching films together, in a dark space on a large bright screen, in an uninterrupted temporal arc.

I believe that first exposure to a film in courses in aesthetic analysis should be under these conditions. (Re-viewings of the film can, and should, be concerned with parts as well as the whole, using freeze-frame scrutiny to study shot composition, editing patterns, sound.) Many of the film studies courses at the University require attendance at such weekly screenings, which, given the drastic decline in theatrical attendance in students’ everyday moviewatching lives, affords them something of the essential collective communal experience that is such an integral part of the “cinema situation.”

As students of film in the 21st century, we should be ever mindful of D.W. Griffith’s goal, articulated shortly after his directing career began in 1908: “The task I’m trying to achieve is above all to make you see.”