Other insightful critics, like Peña at Columbia, agree with Carney's pessimistic take on today's budding film buffs. And they seem to be correct in pointing out that scores of young film fans fail to worship the baby boomers' gods -- Bergman is a classic example -- with the same intensity their parents did. "Even Fellini, who was who I loved when I was young, isn't as relevant anymore," says Richard Breyer, a film professor at Syracuse.

It's also true, as Carney suggests, that some undergraduate film programs have shifted their curriculum to fall in line with what students and academics now find attractive. Syracuse, for example, now offers a Shakespeare-in-film class because students have become fascinated with recent bardic adaptations like Baz Luhrmann's "Romeo + Juliet."

Meanwhile, Bergman and Antonioni films, says Breyer, "are out of the house." Even at NYU, the introductory film course I visited was not a broad survey of brilliance but rather a study of Hitchcock's films, which are still popular today in part, if Carney is to be believed, because they're suspenseful enough to hold students' attention.

Carney's larger argument about German and Japanese films -- that they're favored because they're less challenging -- isn't entirely off base, either. As Basinger at Wesleyan points out, films from both of these countries are closely related to the Hollywood style we've been trained to watch. Early Japanese movies like Kurosawa's "The Seven Samurai" (1954) resemble refashioned westerns, and the style of German expressionism essentially became part of the Hollywood repertoire when Hitchcock, and Austrians like Billy Wilder ("Double Indemnity," 1944) and Fritz Lang ("The Big Heat," 1953), emigrated to join the studio system.

And yet there are several holes in the pessimists' theory. The idea that German and Japanese cinema is inherently superficial because it's familiar and Hollywood-like -- an overgeneralization in its own right -- is a bit like saying that "The Great Gatsby" is shallow because it resembles British Victorian novels that concerned themselves with class and social striving. And even if German and Japanese cinema works within a tradition that young Americans easily comprehend, can it be inferred that the films themselves are less "spiritual" or important? If students are finding those films interesting, does it mean they're less willing to watch other kinds of difficult older films?

Rather than cutting out the older classics from curricula in favor of films that are easy to watch or politically relevant, colleges (and high schools) have actually added films to class viewing schedules -- and film courses to their catalogs. Even small schools like Oberlin have recently made film a fully developed, expansive major so that these days, if students haven't already seen Fellini or Howard Hawks films on their own -- and many of them have, according to Basinger -- they'll likely get the chance to catch up in architecture in film, which is being taught at Cooper Union, or the Italian realists class at Columbia.

And even if there are some students who won't watch any Godard in their films of Weimar Germany class at the University of Montana, there are others who will be introduced to "Vivre Sa Vie" (1963) -- Godard's episodic tale of a Paris prostitute -- in NYU's Hitchcock class, where professor Richard Allen uses the film to show what can be done with ambient sound. Sure, in some cases, the films will be seen through the lens of political theory, feminist theory or Jacques Derrida's frustrating form of deconstruction, but the films are still being seen -- and that includes the "spiritual" ones that Carney feels have fallen into the abyss. As Annette Insdorf, chairwoman of Columbia's undergraduate film program, points out, "There is renewed interest in mavericks like John Cassavetes, now that the independent American cinema is virtually a genre."

So why are baby-boomer critics panicking about the film literacy of younger film addicts?

Partly, says Basinger, it's simply nostalgia: "There's always the assumption that the younger generation A) has no intellectual curiosity; B) won't explore the past; and C) won't notice something good when it's put in front of them."

Older critics who came of age during the era of revival houses, like those described in Theodore Roszak's brilliant novel "Flicker," may also be mistaking shifts in technology for shifts in literacy. "What they remember about the '60s and '70s was that excitement, and revival houses and community," Basinger says. "The fact that kids pop in a DVD and watch it quietly -- it seems different. But it is the same, in a different form. They're missing the group camaraderie, but that doesn't mean that passion isn't there, or the interest isn't there."

In addition, the shift away from European directors that Syracuse's Breyer described seems to have been misinterpreted. It's not that students don't watch Fellini anymore. As Bruce Goldstein, director of repertory programming at FilmForum in New York, points out, the mix of young and old for a Fellini retrospective today is essentially what it was 25 years ago. But certain films seem to age better than others. "Nights of Cabiria" was a favorite of many students I interviewed, while "8 1/2" was off their radars. Both are available on DVD, so it's not a distribution issue. But critics who hear a student disparaging the latter often take this to mean that today's young audiences are unable to appreciate Fellini. And yet there are other explanations: Perhaps, for instance, "Cabiria's" Forrest Gump-like inginue simply resonates more intensely than the Freudian tale of a frustrated filmmaker in "8 1/2."

At the same time, is Gallegos (the one who accidentally discovered "The Third Man") film illiterate because, as he puts it, "I have always been as receptive to Far Eastern cinema (Kurosawa and Ozu) as most film buffs have been to European cinema"? After all, he still watches and understands Fellini; he just doesn't like it as much as his elders do. At what point does criticism of what people read or watch become an excuse to pressure us all into liking the same books or movies? At what point does the idea of a canon cease to be an educational tool, becoming instead a shackle of approved taste? Or a bid for legitimacy from an older, and increasingly cranky, generation of film fans?

Gallegos and other smart 16- to 30-year-old film geeks, don't much care. They simply emphasize that they're seeking their own examples of greatness. Not content to just see and appreciate what their parents loved, they're aiming to deify their own directors, create their own canon.

Which brings us back to the bin at Kim's. It's chock-full of Asian, German, African and Russian cinema. Documentaries, once shunned as less artistic than features, are also there. And with choices ranging from "Come and See," a 1985 Soviet film about World War II, to "The Tokyo Olympiad," a lengthy documentary about the 1964 Olympics, the display presents not just options, but intelligence. Are they spiritual? Probably depends on who you ask. Are they important? Same answer. At least they're undiscovered, says Nelson, the nose-ringed clerk.

"The picks are a way to suggest movies people probably haven't seen," she says. "People know Godard -- they want something new."

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