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Jared Gardner, English/Film studies

Posted on | October 21, 2009 | 238 views |

How has the rise of the DVD changed the way films are taught?
When I started out studying film, VHS wasn’t even widely available for most classic titles, so teaching film required ordering films from 16mm rental companies. There was little time to stop and study the film, and in fact freezing a film to get a specific shot for close analysis required specialized equipment that most of us didn’t have. By the time I got to graduate school, VHS was everywhere and more titles were available. For the first time we could show clips, revisit sequences, etc. But there were downsides to VHS as well: Most of them panned-and-scanned the original film ratio to fit a television, destroying the original composition of the cinematography. The quality of the image was always vastly inferior to original film. DVD transformed film classrooms, allowing access to anywhere in the film, perfect stills, slow-motion, zoom, etc.

For me, the best advantage as a teacher is being able to respond to a question or insight from my students in class by going promptly to the scene in question. In the DVD age, students are used to re-watching films, zooming in or freezing on shots that particularly capture their imagination.

How has the DVD changed the film industry?
In countless ways, still to be measured. Increasingly the bulk of studio revenue from a film comes from DVD sales, not from theatrical release. So filmmakers and studios are starting to think about audiences less as passive spectators in the picture palace on opening night and more as a new kind of audience, watching on TV or laptops with a remote control in hand. As filmmaking increasingly merges with the small screen, everything from cinematography to screenwriting to editing changes, inevitably. The full measure of these changes won’t be clear for a generation, but we can already see some clear changes in, for example, the rise of the “cinema of complexity” (or “puzzle films”) specifically designed for viewers to watch more than once, to hunt through for clues, etc.

What are some benefits and detriments to using film as a teaching tool?
For me, film is a rewarding teaching tool for a number of reasons, perhaps foremost because my students come to class — even if it is their first film course — already with highly developed powers of visual analysis. And there is a unique pleasure to consuming our primary text together, in class, something that can’t be duplicated when I am teaching a triple-decker nineteenth-century novel, for example. The biggest challenges tend to be technical ones: A projector bulb goes out in the middle of a screening, I can’t get the lights to shut off for a screening or the sound system shorts out on me. But we have terrific support from classroom services here, and they can usually solve most of our technical problems quickly.

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