Film professors across America are confronting an alarming reality: students enrolled in cinema courses cannot complete feature-length movies.
Craig Erpelding, a film professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, described the shift.
“I used to think, If homework is watching a movie, that is the best homework ever,” he stated. “But students will not do it.”
Twenty film-studies professors nationwide reported similar experiences, per an explosive report from The Atlantic.
Over the past decade, particularly following the pandemic, students have demonstrated increasing difficulty maintaining attention through full-length films.
Malcolm Turvey, founding director of Tufts University’s Film and Media Studies Program, implemented an electronics ban during screenings.
Approximately half the class still sneaks glances at their devices, according to Turvey.
Akira Mizuta Lippit teaches cinema and media studies at the University of Southern California’s prestigious film program.
He compared his students to nicotine addicts experiencing withdrawal during screenings. Their fidgeting intensifies the longer phones remain untouched until they eventually surrender to distraction.
Lippit recently screened Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 masterpiece The Conversation. He instructed students that watching the essential final scene was mandatory, even if they missed other portions.
Multiple students stared at phones during that crucial moment. “You do have to just pay attention at the very end, and I just can’t get everybody to do that,” he told The Atlantic.
Interestingly, feature films students do watch now cater to shortened attention spans.
Matt Damon revealed on The Joe Rogan Experience that Netflix encourages filmmakers to place action sequences within the first five minutes. According to Damon, Netflix has also advised directors to have characters repeat plot details three or four times so multitasking audiences can follow along.
The Atlantic noted that some professors are fighting back.
Kyle Stine, a film and media-studies professor at Johns Hopkins, for example, is piloting a slow-cinema course featuring minimalist films with minimal narrative to help students redevelop extended attention.
Rick Warner, University of North Carolina’s film studies director, deliberately assigns slow-paced films.
“I try to teach films that put their habits of viewing under strain,” Warner explained.
“I’m trying to sell them on the idea that a film watched properly can actually help them retrain their perception and can teach them how to concentrate again.”
Other professors are adapting to student preferences. Some show shorter films or divide movies across multiple sessions.
Back in October, a Columbia University professor revealed yet another troubling trend affecting even the nation’s most prestigious colleges: incoming students are arriving unprepared to read complete books.
Nicholas Dames, who has taught Literature Humanities at Columbia University since 1998, told The Atlantic that he has witnessed a dramatic shift in student capabilities over the past decade.
The course, a required great-books curriculum at the Ivy League institution, has remained unchanged, but the students taking it have not.
According to Dames, today’s college students appear overwhelmed by reading assignments that previous generations handled routinely.
The professor noted that while students have historically struggled to complete all assigned readings, the current situation represents something fundamentally different.
