I am a little surprised that this question is getting framed in an either-or
fashion. In my classes at MIT, we have a four hour a week screening period
during which I typically show two films. I arrange this several different
ways depending on the course. In my pop culture courses, I do a four hour
block with two films, since people seem pretty comfortable with horror or
comedy double-bills. For the more "artsy" film courses, I do two screenings
a week, adjacent to the seminar time slot. I believe one of the key goals of
undergraduate film education is to expose students to as many different films
as possible. I also think double-bills allows us to set up useful oppositions,
comparisons, or intertextual relations between films. In my Intro. course now,
for instance, I structure it around dialogues between contemporary and more
classical films, an approach that allows them to understand the importance
of history to their appreciation of contemporary films and motivates them to
watch closely films which might otherwise bore them.
   In addition, I make extensive use of clips in the classes themselves. The
clips allow me to expose them to a taste of a wider variety of films than
I would actually be able to show them otherwise, and helps to more fully
contextualize the films we are studying in more detail. I find in an age of
video tape stores, that a high percentage of the students get intrigued by
one or another of the clips, and when they stand in front of the shelf at
Blockbusters, find themselves grabbing the films to watch as wholes. This allows
 me to open up a whole area of film for them, which they will keep on viewing
after the course is done, rather than simply exposing them to a dozen or so
films that can be shown during classtimes.
   So, the answer is both whole films and clips, as many films as possible, and
with as strong a sense of the inter-relationships between films as you can
manage.
 
Henry Jenkins
MIT
 
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