Henry: I find your "three generations" division of academic film scholars (at least American ones) dead-on, and I hope your challenge is taken up. One comment on your description of generation #2, those who were drawn to theory and away from earlier belletristic approaches. In one important sense, the turn to high theoretical "jargon" was a strategic political move, especially on the part of feminist women scholars who saw media studies as a new field not completely dominated by an old gaurd. The creation of an insider, special language served the purpose of creating a new knowledge-territory, indecipherable by those who had for so long withheld grants, jobs, tenure, etc. from women scholars. So the current embrace of a more "public" language is fraught with a more-than-implicit challenge to a feminist agenda that has found some limited success within academia (or at least the humanities and social sciences). The currently emerging style -- a kind of Plain Speech with a Fair Use doctrine for Jargon-When-Necessary-In-The-Line-Of-Duty -- can be seen by some as a weakening of the very institutional and discursive safeguards that feminist scholars worked so hard to construct in the seventies and eighties. While I don't share this view, I very much sympathize with it, and try to encourage my students to be open to (and, yes, to even enjoy and appreciate) so-called jargon. There may be a time when a new jargon will serve some useful purpose. James Schamus