Brooke Jaconbson writes: "Mike Frank says he finds that students respond mainly to film as narrative and not as spectacle. Thus, he wonders if there is any point in getting them into the theater. I too find students tend to discuss film as narrative. The story is a familiar category of experience, and the aspect most commonly dealt with in popular writing about film. Video can provide that narrative, but the object of getting students into the theater is to open up that other dimension of the cinematic so that they become conscious of spectacle and find a language to articulate its relation to their experience of narrative." The preoccupation with narrative by audiences and critics has been an ongoing American theme. During the beginnings of film noir in the late 1940 s, few American reviewers seem to have noticed that interesting things were happening to the lighting and camerawork in such films as CROSSFIRE and MURDER, MY SWEET (British reviewers, on the other hand, at least mentioned such things). It was only in the late 1960s that critics began to shift emphasis--the turning point might be the issue of TIME magazine that recanted its previous pan of BONNIE AND CLYDE with a full cover story (and cover by Robert Rauschenberg!). It seems to me that there's something of a shift in emphasis back to narrative again in the pop press--but it will never be a complete swing back to just a concentration on narrative. Video may be a symptom of this. I just rewatched THE WONDERFUL HORRIBLE LIFE OF LENI REIFENSTAHL, which I had previously seen in the theater. In one scene, she discusses her love of modern art (and thus "demonstrates" why she couldn't be a Nazi!). As she does, a big book on Van Gogh is prominently displayed behind her--surely a stage prop set by this mistress of mise-en-scene. Yet in the videotape I watched (set on Extended Play, to be sure), the book was hard to see and the lettering illegible. I'm not sure if Leni's loss or ours is greater here! But it *is* a loss. Don Larsson, Mankato State U (MN) ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]