Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
Columbia University's introductory film class meets at 9:30 a.m. in a darkened screening room with 72 seats. Most of the students who shuffle into the class -- a half-dozen arrive late, with coffee -- seem to have just climbed out of bed. There are denim-clad freshmen without majors, and unshaven seniors who see the class as a break from their other lab or text-based courses. Shifting quietly in their seats, they all seem only mildly interested in the classic films that form the traditional backbone of cinematic history. Getting them to answer questions requires repeated prodding from Larry Engel, their compact, bright professor who spends about an hour going over last week's film, Sergei Eisenstein's silent communist propaganda vehicle "Battleship Potemkin" (1925).
But when Engel starts screening the day's films -- clips of Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times" (1936) and "M," Fritz Lang's dark 1931 thriller -- the class seems to perk up. Eyes are wide open, students laugh at all the right places and take notes whenever Engel pipes in a comment like, "That opening is one of the best openings to a sound film, anywhere, anytime."
During the break and after class, I ask a half-dozen students what they think of older films and the idea of film literacy. A couple have a hard time explaining why they took the class, perhaps because they're half asleep or afraid to admit that they thought it would be an easy A. The others' opinions range from complete disgust with modern movies -- "I'm far more interested in the classics," says Jeansun Lee, a sophomore computer science major -- to a nuanced appreciation for certain aspects of the old.
Chris Wells, a bespectacled freshman who is considering a film major, admits that the older films are sometimes difficult to watch. "We have to learn a new language; it's like being taught to read all over again," he says. And yet, while the experience can be especially trying (he cites Godard films as an example), Wells says that he and many of his friends have learned to recognize the value of older films. "They're important because every movie today uses elements from the past," he says. "They help you understand movies of today."
Wells' interest in film started in high school when an enthusiastic English teacher screened Ernst Lubitsch's "Trouble in Paradise" (1932) and Charles Laughton's "The Night of the Hunter" (1955) -- one a romantic comedy, the other a Gothic tale of greed, both of them produced under the old Hollywood studio system. Wells immediately realized that classic cinema had something to offer. Soon he was exploring on his own, going to repertory houses, renting videos and making vigorous use of the Internet.
"The Net helped me a lot," he says. "You can find out anything about a movie from IMDB.com [the Internet Movie Database]. And what's great is that one thing leads to another. If you like one movie, you can go online and find other movies it was influenced by. There are so many paths you can go down and it's really interesting to connect the dots."
A similar level of inquisitiveness thrived in a film class for nonfilm majors at New York University. In fact, at universities across the country -- Oberlin, campuses in the University of California system, Boston College, Pomona, to name just a few -- film classes are some of the most popular offerings on campus. And like Wells, many students seem to be self-educating, connecting their own dots.
This comes through not just in face-to-face and telephone interviews with scholars and students but also, as Wells suggested, through the Internet. I posted a series of questions on message boards at IMDB.com, Google Groups, Yahoo and other sites that focus on the issue of whether old movies are still important and whether Generation X and Y lack appreciation for the "classics." The response was overwhelming. From all over the country, college students, recent graduates and high school students wrote to say that yes, most young filmgoers would rather watch "The Matrix" (1999) than "The Conversation" (1974), Francis Ford Coppola's take on the dangers of surveillance, but a growing minority want to see both.
Consider J.M. Gallegos, a recent graduate of Western Connecticut State University. Like many people his age, 25, he discovered a passion for classic cinema accidentally. "I came across 'The Third Man' one night on TV -- I think it was AMC -- about three or four years ago," says the former English major, in an e-mail he sent after finding one of my posts. "I started watching it, and as soon as I could, a day or so later, went out to rent it. It was unlike anything else I had seen before, and it opened my eyes to what film can be. After that, just like when I was introduced to classic literature in college, I began exploring older/classic films as often as I could; everything from 'The Birth of a Nation,' to 'Modern Times,' to 'Lawrence of Arabia,' to 'Chinatown.'" Now, Gallegos says, his favorites are not blockbusters but rather, "the works of Chaplin, Welles, Kurosawa, and Kubrick."
The group I met online included other equally passionate fans of classic cinema: people like J.W. Mathews, a 17-year-old high school senior in Amherst, Mass., who lists Truffaut's "The 400 Blows," Kurosawa's "The Seven Sumurai," and Welles' "Citizen Kane" on his list of top 20 favorite films; and an anonymous teenager who wrote to say that he has seen every film on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 Greatest American Movies of All-Time.
A. Madison, an archaeology major at Arizona State, said that "most of what I know about movies I learned on my own -- either through watching them or reading something about them." There was also a 16-year-old high school student who, after watching "The Apartment" in class, says that now "encouraging classic film appreciation among my peers is a secret agenda of mine"; and Kyle, an 18-year-old college freshman, who insisted that "to appreciate film's full capabilities you should see the widest varieties of genres and nationalities. American, German, Italian, Japanese, French, British -- you name it, any kind of cinema."
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