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 ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]