Is this--complaints and objections from students (and parents?)--a problem more common in public universities and colleges (and also in certain parts of the country--e.g. the midwest?--remember the action of the Iowa? legislature 6 or 8 years ago). I have in fact been surprised that, with over 20 years of teaching film (at Vassar), no student has yet asked to be excused from an assignment (or seriously complained afterward versus saying they didn't like or were disgusted by the film). In advanced courses I have used an occasional explicit film ("Caligula"--most found it boring and/or pretentious; I think it is really about forms of violence) and films like "Clockwork Orange" and "Natural Born Killers." In intermediate courses I have used Makavejev's "WR" and a variety of other things, including "Love and Anarchy." "L and A" ends with, to my sense, one of the most violent scenes in all cinema (the anarchist hero is beaten to a pulp in a Fascist prison after an abortive attempt to kill Mussolini). While the ratings for films are usually included on the syllabus (this would be an R, presumably), you can't tell people what's going to happen ahead of time. Much of the effect--and the point Wertmuller is making--depends on being shocked and even nauseated, and crushed, when this happens. There can only be some general remarks and people have to choose at the beginning whether to take the course or not. This latter case raises a more pervasive problem for introductory and film history classes. For film history, there are things there that are a central part of the history that need to be seen, some violent, some sexual. For introductory classes I like my students to encounter the films (never interpretively innocent, of course) with as little commentary/preinterpretation from me as possible. Take "Un Chien Andalou"--can you really warn them about the eyeball without damaging the effect (horror AND beauty) [and what of one's own temptation to delight in schocking people]? However, what does bother me--and there seems little way of dealing with it--is not offending sensibilities in these kind of cases, but inadvertently opening wounds, for lack of a beeter term. This was brought home a number of years ago in an aesthetics class when a student said she had been unable to complete the assignment on Peter Greenaway's "The Draughtman's Contract" because of the rape scene (or what she took to be such), herself having been raped only a few weeks before. ---- Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite http://www.tcf.ua.edu/ScreenSite