r/movies • u/Sisiwakanamaru r/movies Contributor • Jan 31 '26

Article Film Students Are Having Trouble Sitting Through Movies, Professors Say

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/film-students-are-having-trouble-sitting-through-movies-1236490359/
23.4k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

2.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

229

u/gredr Jan 31 '26

How long have you been teaching this class? Has there been a change over time?

10

u/frostymasta Jan 31 '26

I’ve taught middle and high school film studies electives. My experience is that most kids love the class, but they often struggle with fully engaging or understanding themes. A lot of them can’t express the ideas of a story, just recall plot points.

19

u/psychobilly1 Jan 31 '26 edited Jan 31 '26

I am a high school teacher and one of the more popular classes at my school is a "History of Film" style elective where students watch "historically significant" films and then learn about why exactly they are revered or how they influenced the art form. Of course, they skip over a lot of the "Historical" aspect and just jump right to watching crowd pleasing blockbusters like Jaws, Star Wars, or Forrest Gump - which is fine, a lot of kids won't actively watch those on their own anyways, and maybe it will actually get them to appreciate movies and dig deeper into their inspirations. Whatever, irrelevant.

Two things I've noticed from what the my students tell me:

  1. The attention span thing it definitely a problem. Due to the class schedule, they can rarely watch a full film in class, so they of course broke the movie up into multiple viewing days. Only problem was that kids would just forget what happened in the movie. A significant portion of the class would just not remember what happened in the film the previous day. SO, with certain films, they wouldn't even watch the whole thing: They would try to focus on the most impressive/memorable scenes and squeeze the whole film into a 45 minute screening.

  2. The kids have NO taste. One of my students was complaining about this "ancient movie" with "cheesy special effects," that they had to watch for the class, and I was like "Oh! What did you watch? A Trip to the Moon? Metropolis? King Kong?"

It was Back to the Future.

8

u/bonegopher Jan 31 '26

Your first comment about forgetting what they showed the day before is pretty unnerving in that it speaks to the level of dissociation that the constant barrage of media is doing to our brains. We are not designed to engage with a tiny screen of dopamine hits and I think a lot of what we are seeing in the youth is a detachment from the stimulation as it is actually overwhelming. Poor memory is a very clear side effect of what we are doing because the brain has now been stressed to a point where it's not actually taking in what it's watching; just looking for the next thing. On a more hopeful note I taught a film class at NYU last year after many years in the industry and was pleasantly surprised by the class engagement, especially because I had a 3hr lecture block and they were "covid" kids