The Film Students Who Can No Longer Sit Through Films

"Everyone knows it's hard to get college students to do the reading-remember books? But the attention-span crisis is not limited to the written word. Professors are now finding that they can't even get film students- film students-to sit through movies. "I used to think, If homework is watching a movie, that is the best homework ever," Craig Erpelding, a film professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. "But students will not do it.""

"I heard similar observations from 20 film-studies professors around the country. They told me that over the past decade, and particularly since the pandemic, students have struggled to pay attention to feature-length films. Malcolm Turvey, the founding director of Tufts University's Film and Media Studies Program, officially bans electronics during film screenings. Enforcing the ban is another matter: About half the class ends up looking furtively at their phones."

"Akira Mizuta Lippit, a cinema and media-studies professor at the University of Southern California-home to perhaps the top film program in the country-said that his students remind him of nicotine addicts going through withdrawal during screenings: The longer they go without checking their phone, the more they fidget. Eventually, they give in. He recently screened the 1974 Francis Ford Coppola classic The Conversation."

College film students increasingly fail to watch or focus on assigned feature-length films, with many unable to sit through screenings. Professors nationwide report that attention problems have grown over the past decade and worsened since the pandemic. In-class electronics bans are common, but about half of students still check phones during screenings. Some instructors see no change among dedicated students, but many note pervasive fidgeting and withdrawal-like behavior as students resist checking devices. Faculty attempts to emphasize essential scenes sometimes fail when students skip or ignore films, undermining learning in both large and small film courses.

Read at The Atlantic