Film professors are sounding an alarm that would have been unthinkable a decade ago: even film majors don't want to sit through movies. In interviews with 20 film-studies instructors nationwide, Rose Horowitch of the Atlantic found a broad shift in students' ability—and willingness—to watch full-length films, especially since the pandemic. Even at marquee programs like USC, professors describe students fidgeting like nicotine addicts during screenings, sneaking glances at phones and tuning out, sometimes even during pivotal final scenes they've been explicitly told to watch, writes Horowitch.
The problem doesn't vanish when screenings move online—homework for film students, essentially. At Indiana University, data from the school's streaming platform showed that fewer than half of students even started assigned films, and only about one in five finished them. Those who do often admit to multitasking, watching at double speed, or skipping around. The fallout shows up on exams: students in one class badly flubbed basic questions about plots of canonical films. Professors largely blame a lifetime of short-form, always-available media rather than laziness. This is the first generation to grow up with the infinite scroll, spending hours a day on social apps and toggling between screens every minute or less.
Some instructors are pushing back with "slow cinema" courses meant to rebuild sustained attention, while others take the resistance-is-futile approach by assigning shorter works, breaking long films into chunks, or pivoting to three- or four-minute projects that mirror social-media clips. "The disconnect is that 10 years ago, people who wanted to go study film and media creation were cinephiles themselves," says film professor Craig Erpelding of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. "Nowadays, they're people that consume the same thing everyone else consumes, which is social media." Read the full story.
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
