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DAVID THORBURN: One of the
central arguments of my film

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course-- and this
is one of the ways

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it's different from
a traditional film

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course in a university,
in a cinema studies

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program, or even in an English
department-- is that it sees

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the advent of television as a
critical factor in the history

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of the movies, much more
central and critical than most

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contemporary
histories acknowledge.

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Because what I try to
show is that the function

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that the movies had in American
society before the advent

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of television was the
function that the novel had

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in the 19th Century in
Europe, and the function

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that Shakespeare's public
theater had in Shakespeare's

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day, a form of popular narrative
that's articulated a kind of

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assumed or imagine
consensus of values

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for the whole of the society.

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That made it a culturally,
and anthropologically,

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and socially much
more important medium

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then a mere artistic
medium, even

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though it's artistic quality
remains very important.

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So that one of the
ironies of entertainment

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is it can become a
space, especially

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public forms of
entertainment in cultures,

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like Shakespeare's
public theater,

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or like the public theater
of the American movie

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system in the studio era, these
public spaces can become spaces

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in which the body politic, the
political and social community

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entertains ideas
about its own nature,

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entertains,
considers, speculates,

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holds in its mind
accounts of its origins,

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stories of its values
And what we can say then

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is that the space
of entertainment

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becomes from in a certain angle
in virtually all societies,

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a space of discourse, a space
in which-- exactly because it's

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a space recognized as not
real, as make believe,

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is therefore licensed or
allowed to explore possibilities

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that might be too dangerous
or too disturbing to explore

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in other way.

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And I taught both television
and film in this way.

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In an ironic way, it's
a deeply literary way

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to teach the medium.

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So the argument ends up
being that the movies

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after television, the
movies after about 1970,

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are profoundly a
different animal.

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The old studio system is dead.

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Movies have become
much more single,

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individual deal-making
events using great stars,

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and particularly bankable
scriptwriters, and scripts,

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and so forth, nothing
like the great factory

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for the making of
stories, the story machine

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that the movies had been until
the advent of television,

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and that television became
as it took on that consensus

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function.

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I think it's a powerful
and central insight that

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helps to explain the
tremendous changes that

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overtake American
movies after, certainly,

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after 1970 and beyond.

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Another way in which
I think my film course

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is not fully a film course,
even though every text we study

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is a movie, all the scholarship
site is movie schol-- not all.

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But some is movie scholarship.

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And I try to teach them about
the history of film in ways

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that I think are
helpful to them.

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But there is a profoundly
literary dimension

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to my teaching.

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And I think of as deeply
as a literature course.

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It's a course that,
if a student takes,

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serves as a prerequisite for
advanced subjects in literature

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as well as in media.

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And my reasons
for that is that I

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treat the problems one confronts
in a film from the perspective

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of a professor of literature,
from the perspective of one

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who's a specialist in narrative.

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Remember, many of the narratives
that I have taught all my life

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we're not printed
texts like novels.

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They wear all narratives,
like Homer's Odyssey.

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Or, they were dramatic
presentations.

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Like Shakespeare's plays.

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Literature has never
meant simply printed text.

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And I think my field is
narrative of all sorts.

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And what I try to do is show
them, among other things,

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certain kinds of
linkages or continuities

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across different
forms of narrative.

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And I certainly try
to make them see

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that movies in a certain era,
television in another era,

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were like the literature
of earlier eras.

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And it makes my film course a
much more centrally literary

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and humanistic subject than
would be the case if it

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were taught in a more
conventional kind of cinema

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studies sequence.