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DAVID THORBURN: The film
experience is, as I said,

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began many years ago, 38 or
39 years ago in the version

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that I teach.

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And it has undergone
almost a continuous process

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of transformation.

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One of the ironies is that
it began its career in an era

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before there was any
technology available to support

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film study.

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It made things
actually very awkward.

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But it was also in some way
convenient for the professor.

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What we used to have to
do was show the film.

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We used to-- and
in fact, MIT belong

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to a group called the
University Film Study Center.

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A group of institutions,
included Harvard and Yale.

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And what we did was we had a
library of 16 millimeter prints

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of classic films.

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And we circulated them.

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So you had to
alter your syllabus

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so that the guy at
Harvard was also

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able to do Keaton because
there was only one

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copy of The General available.

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So that was very complicated.

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And but we all managed to do it.

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And then at while I
was at MIT, that system

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became moribund because
videotape became available,

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and films became
available on videotape.

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We also begin to be able to
project them on videotape.

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So we didn't have
the problem of trying

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to rent the movie
at great expense,

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or to belong to the
Film Study Center,

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and try to keep these fraying 16
millimeter prints in operation.

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So that was a great boon.

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It also allowed us
for the first time

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to stop and start the text.

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So it allowed for forms of
close reading of the media that

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had never existed before.

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And one of the things it
exposed was the errors

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of older scholars
and older critics,

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who were working from
memory in describing films,

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because in order to write
about a film in the old days,

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in the days when I
began to teach film,

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you actually had
to project a movie.

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And they had scholarly
versions of 16 millimeter

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and other kinds
of projectors that

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would allow you to
stop and start things

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so you could study things.

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They were fairly expensive.

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And you had to go to an archive
that had the material film.

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The advent of videotape
transformed media study

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and transformed film study
in ways that are still not

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fully clear because every
film scholar, any place

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in the world, was able to get
his hands on important text.

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And that process is, of
course, been elaborated

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an almost infinite
number of times,

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a tremendous number of
times over the past decade,

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so that today, people could
go online and virtually get

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access, certainly to clips,
and to many older films that

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were never available before.

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And every university,
and every film class

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has access to this
material, and can even

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set up-- first, as we've finally
done at MIT-- a system in which

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students can actually
videostream films

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to their own laptops at will.

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And that's another
wrinkle because that's

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a very recent addition to
what the film course did.

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So in the beginning, we would
have a communal viewing.

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And it was the only
time the students

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could look at the film.

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They couldn't even get
a second look at it.

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Then we moved to a phase
in which we continued

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to have the communal viewing.

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But we made videotape
versions of the films

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available on
reserve for students

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who wanted to write papers
or to review for exams.

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And then we moved to a phase in
which when DVDs were available,

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we would sometimes not only
project the film from DVDs,

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but we would also make
both tapes and video

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DVDs available to students
for use after class.

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And we would also allow
students to borrow the DVDs

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and watch them in
their own time,

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and not attend the
communal viewing if they

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were unable to attend.

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And, of course, that
immediately set in a process,

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began a process of attrition, in
which fewer and fewer students

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found time to come to
the communal viewings.

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This is partly a function of
the scheduling crisis at MIT,

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and the busyness
of our students.

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If they have an option to
do it in their own time,

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they will often do
so, so that what

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had been a kind of sacred space
in the course, the 8 to 10

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evening slot that I often used
to show the film experience

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text became less and
less well attended.

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And this had the
also troubling effect

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of a slight-- ans I say maybe
more than slight-- but at least

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a slight decline in the
attendance at the evening

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lecture.

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Because the way I
taught the course was

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I had one lecture at 4 o'clock.

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From 4:00 to 5:00, they
would break for dinner

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or their sports activities.

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At 7 o'clock, I would give
an introductory lecture.

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And at 8 o'clock, the communal
screening would begin.

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That communal moment before
the advent of streaming

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and before it was
easy for the students

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to get access to the
text on their own,

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was a much more powerful
moment than it has become.

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And so we haven't
figured out what to do.

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We haven't exactly figured
how the course can evolve

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in ways that can maximize the
students opportunity to look

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at the material
in their own time,

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but also maintain a sense
that there are certain spaces

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ad times during the day that
are devoted to our activity,

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just as there are for
their physics lab,

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and just as there are for
their chemistry lecture.

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We've got to do that to maintain
our parody with the sciences.

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When I begin the
film experience,

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I asked the students
to do something

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they find increasingly
difficult. In the old days,

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this request wasn't necessary
in quite the same way.

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In the old days, before the
proliferation of smartphones,

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and visual media all over
the place, and everyone

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being able to make his own video
and so forth, and the ubiquity

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of DVDs, before those days, I
was able to tell the students,

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look, we live in an
audio visual age.

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We live in a televisual age.

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I want you to think
that stuff away.

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I want you to think
yourself back to an age

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before people
understood that there

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is such a thing as a film.

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And think about the original
meaning of movie is.

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Go back to the root meaning.

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It's a metaphor that is
a dead metaphor for us.

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But it actually--
it tells you what

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the most fundamental
aspect of the movies

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were for the original audiences,
and why they were so fascinated

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by the capacity of this new
technology to capture motion.

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It seemed like, and it was,
a tremendous new advance

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in technologies of
the representation

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of human experience, because
it captured humans in motion.

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It captured the
movements of the world.

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And the first films, as I
try to show my students,

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were so preoccupied by
this wondrous capacity

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of the medium, that it's almost
the only thing they filmed.

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And you can see the evolution
of the medium embodied

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in the way in which, after an
initial profound fascination

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with the novelty of
movement begins to wear off,

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other properties of the film
medium begin to be discovered.

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So I tell my students
this principle.

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And I ask them to try
to think their way back

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into the attitude of
these first viewers, who

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didn't know about
the visual media,

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to play a kind of
thought experiment.

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Today, it's much
harder to make them

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play that experiment
because I have to tell them,

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as I do in that first lecture,
think away your iPads.

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Imagine a world without iPads.

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Imagine a world
without smartphones.

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Imagine a world without
instant communication.

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And of course, this is much
harder for the students to do.

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And of course, at one level
they're much more capable

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of processing audio visual
information than I am,

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and then my parents' generation,
and all of the generations

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older than they are,
because they've grown up

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in an environment in which
essentially they're surrounded

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24/7 by audio visual stimuli,
by audio visual signals.

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Many people might see
this as dangerous.

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Perhaps it is.

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But it develops new capacities.

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And one can see this in
the history of television,

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in which at a
certain point, there

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are certain kinds of
television programs

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that become too complex
for older generations.

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And only the younger-- the
cutoff comes around 1980

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with a show called Hill
Street Blues, which

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older fans, the fans that belong
to my parents' generation,

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couldn't watch because
it had too many subplots.

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And it jumped around too much.

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But the younger
generation that was

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used to going to the movies, and
had been watching television,

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and had been watching MTV,
or the origins of MTV,

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were able to understand
this very easily.

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And of course, that
process continued

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on television very
intensely sot that today,

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there are forms of television
whose audio visual complexity

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is beyond the imagination of the
people who were making programs

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for the medium in the 1950s.

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One irony of this situation is
that even though the students

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are very adept at
processing this information,

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they are even more
ignorant about the history

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of the medium, especially the
history of movies, than ever.

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And it's even harder
today to find students

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who even remember the
environment in which people had

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television sets that required
you to change the channels,

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or who had television sets
in which were confined

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to a single room, and
which in order to watch it,

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you had to move into that room.

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So the physical environment
is changing so much.

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And of course,
the original space

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of the movies, the
great communal theater,

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that's a dying space.

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You have to try to remind
the students about that.

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And so the part of
teaching the film course

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has become much more historical.