In response to this very interesting question of how and why students 

ought to watch films, I'm struck by the ways in which we seek to 

calibrate this to some kind of imagined "normal" movie-going 

experience -- the value of the big screen etc.



Jason Grant McKahan suggests that we might start to see this argument 

losing ground a little.



>However,

>changes in the film industry with the increase in windows (pay-per, home

>video, etc) and the accompanying changes in production methods (e.g.

>televisionization of film) have brought the ecological validity argument

>into question...



This correlates strongly to the reported decline in movie-going -- 

which outside of the US has in any case been a problem for a range of 

national cinemas like Australia's, which typically captures less than 

10% of its own annual domestic box office, and more recently has 

slumped to below 2%. So as someone teaching Australian film, I have 

to think seriously about whether projecting Australian films onto 

something larger than a television isn't a significant distortion of 

their usual exhibition circumstances.



Because I'm also interested in students learning to evaluate the ways 

in which movies are consumed, I have tried a couple of different 

approaches. Firstly, I have required students to see a film of their 

choosing in a movie theatre, and to report on both the movie and the 

experience.  If they want to do this on a date, or in a group, that's 

fine with me.  I've found that this has encouraged a more sympathetic 

grasp of the work that movies have to do in general to capture the 

attention of audiences, as well as of the ways in which movie types 

find (or fail to find) their corresponding audience types.



Secondly, I have required students to construct their own viewing 

syllabus, choosing a minimum number of movies in given categories 

(genres, periods, country of origin -- whatever the focus of the 

syllabus) over the course of a semester.  Students find these films 

wherever they can, and report on them weekly in a collaborative 

electronic journal, each adding to the previous reviews of the same 

film.  In the case of Australian film, the experience of searching 

for movies in rental stores, pay-TV schedules, K-Mart bargain bins 

and library collections has been a useful part of demonstrating the 

dispersed nature of exhibition for a national industry effectively 

relegated to the margins of its own domestic theatrical market.



As well as removing the problem of mandatory screenings, this has 

usefully shifted the presumption that in order to have a meaningful 

discussion of film, we have to be discussing the same film -- 

sometimes the comparison between similar films is just as useful.



Best wishes,

Kate



-- 



Dr Kate Bowles

Senior Lecturer, Media and Cultural Studies

School of Social Science, Media and Communication

Faculty of Arts

University of Wollongong

NSW 2522 Australia

tel: +612 42 214651     fax: +612 42 215341    email: [log in to unmask]



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