Teaching film studies in the age of streamed screenings and the commercial teaching archive

Abstract

New modes of online and hybrid course delivery can pose significant challenges for teaching film studies. The shift from in-class screenings to online delivery of course films impacts what is available to screen—privileging work available in digital form—and how this material is accessed and engaged with. This article discusses some of the issues and opportunities that can arise from the move to online learning for film programs by reflecting on the place of ‘unseen’ films in the curriculum and classroom. Over the past few years ‘unmade films’ have become an area of interest for film scholars for understanding how material resources and opportunities are allocated in screen industries. This article proposes that contemporary film studies teaching needs an analogous discourse of unseen cinema, and explores how teaching ‘the films we can’t see’ might offer a productive way of teaching film studies in the age of online delivery.

Introduction

Teaching film and screen studies in the age of streaming platforms demands a significant reimagining of the practical and conceptual dynamics of our discipline. The material circumstances of the streaming era practically impact how teaching happens but also encourage a popular perception of an age of ‘boundless media’ that dramatically reframes the possibility of critical engagement and spectatorship. These developments came into sharp focus during the asynchronous learning practices that were accelerated by Covid-19, where the shift in many universities from on-campus to online screenings presented several knotty issues that are not well understood beyond the discipline and have received little sustained attention within it. This essay aims to address this gap by examining some of the obstacles and opportunities—conceptual, financial and pedagogical—of teaching film studies in the streaming era, with the goal of reflecting on how we can best sustain a critical and creative engagement with all that cinema is. We acknowledge at the outset that the core issues we reflect upon in what follows are not specific to the streaming era. Questions around the ephemerality of film and television texts, the partiality of screen archives, and the practices of distracted spectatorship are topics that film studies scholars have grappled with over time, and in some instances form critical themes for the discipline as a whole (Bean and Negra, 2002; Beeston and Solomon, 2023; Callahan, 2010; Friedberg, 1993; Hagener and Zimmermann, 2024; Rodowick, 2007; Russell, 2018). We are interested in exploring how these and further issues pertaining to what film studies is, and can be, are intensified by the changes that were quickly adopted as ‘the new normal’ during and following the pandemic years.

The essay is divided into three parts. In the first section, we outline some of the material and institutional issues that have been arising in film studies courses and programs with the move to online learning. (For the purposes of this essay, we include under the name film studies, film, cinema, and screen studies as these are the names under which the discipline is mostly commonly known.) In outlining some of the ramifications of the shift online, we recognise that neither the opportunities nor the constraints of this move are felt equally across all universities, or for all students. Nor, of course, does this shift impact all areas of film studies, and all kinds of cinema and screen culture, in the same ways. We focus on the Australian context because this is the context that we each work in and are thereby able to most readily collect data upon and reflect on. ¹ This focus also has value because licensing and copyright issues around educational use of film and video vary from one country to another, and as such, identifying similarities and differences across teaching contexts can help support better resourcing of film studies programs. In the second section we look at the different kinds of experience that the shift to online learning can entail. This includes both changes to course content (both the loss and gain of access to titles for streaming) and changes to how that content is engaged with (most notably, the shift to online course screenings and the loss of the in-person screening as a specific kind of social and learning encounter in which student and teachers come together to engage with a screen text. This experience has long been considered valuable in film & screen studies teaching for the ways it can productively unsettle habitual viewing modes, support engagement with difficult or challenging material, and create opportunities to reflect on different experiences of the work screened and the rhythms and tones of both the screen text and its viewing). Our concern here is not to lament an historical ideal, but to think about how screen pedagogy can think critically about contemporary modes of viewing and connect these to the essential features of the cinematic. In the third section, we outline ways that the new forms of screen experience that accompany and underlie the shift to online learning can be mobilised to teach film studies and history not only as ‘topics’ but also as method.

Part 1: Streaming film studies

In this section we are specifically interested in the place of course screenings for film studies in the streaming era. The move to streaming course films raises questions about access—access to reliable internet, access to a suitable viewing/study space, access to a suitable device and indeed access to the desired film itself. Some of these requirements are consistent with general internet needs for online education and learning, the uneven distribution of which became glaringly apparent during Covid. As Elizabeth Ellcessor writes, the move to online education during this period increased access in many ways, but higher education institutions demonstrated a general lack of material support and resourcing for the type of skilled ‘access work’ that actually supports learning in this environment, such as options in captioning, formats and means of engagement (Ellcessor, 2021, see also Tack, 2023). Scholars writing on higher education have considered what this ‘access work’ looks like in different humanities disciplines, including art and design (Alsuwaida, 2022; Fleischmann, 2020; Nyboer et al., 2024), theatre and performance (Banks et al., 2022) and creative arts (Burke, 2021), reflecting in each case on how social, structural and cultural shifts catalysed by the introduction of online learning is producing ‘different’ learners that necessitate new ways of thinking about arts pedagogies (Nyboer et al., 2024). We build on these insights to argue that there are critical and specific issues at play in this context for the discipline of film studies. In making this argument, though, we are aiming to contribute to broader conversations about humanities education in the online and hybrid environment of the 2020s and beyond, where questions about how different forms of learning materials are privileged, lost and variously shaped as ‘important’ by experts, markets and algorithms are critical to track.

Many, if not all, film studies programs explore the shifting parameters of film and television, and the multitude of transformations they have undergone in the digital age. While the shift to streamed screenings is tied to many of the transformations that are central concerns of such contemporary film debates—including questions around viewing practices, medium specificity, multi-platform circulation, film form, and media ownership—the move has received little critical attention in program development and discipline pedagogy discussions in universities. Some important work has emerged in screen and media studies research, however. In 2021 George S. Larke-Walsh and Murray Leeder edited a Journal of Cinema and Media Studies teaching dossier on practices in online teaching of film and media, focusing specifically on experiences in the time of COVID. This collection combines reflections on teaching media production online with discussion of strategies for accessing media and encouraging student engagement. Some notable inclusions here for the issues we’re concerned with in this article are several pieces by Australian educators. These include ‘When Zoom Replaces the Cinema: Reimagining Film Studies Online During COVID-19 through Collaborative Teaching and Community Building’ (Creely et al., 2021), which reflects specifically on how to replicate the community and culture of film studies in the absence of on-campus screenings, and ‘Gazing or glancing? Mapping student engagement when film studies moves online’ (Kannas et al., 2023) in a special issue of Convergence on Digital Pedagogies Post-Covid-19. This latter team of teacher-researchers considers how students were able to mobilise the conceptual tools of film studies to reflect on the dynamics of second screen use and viewing environment and temporality that the move to online screenings during COVID created. Taking a longer view, Hamish Ford and Rebecca Beirne have reflected on designing a fully online version of a Screen and Cultural Studies program pre-COVID, producing courses for a learning management system loosely based on social media formats that, in their experience, ‘has proven an ideal platform for our major’s encouragement of student learning’ (2025: 82). Further work has considered the specific impacts of digital access to films for education in different national contexts during and after COVID (Atkinson and Bulbulia, 2021), including in a special issue of BioScope focusing on local experiences of ‘pandemic media’ in the South Asia region (Vasudevan et al., 2022).

As some of this work notes, the technology and expectations for asynchronous online lectures have been building in universities for years and as a result are well supported by educational design teams, but this is overwhelmingly not the case for the specific mode of course screenings. Asking students to watch a key film, television episode(s) or other kind of screen text each week is a foundational approach in our discipline, providing a common case study with which to reflect upon the week’s topic. As Ford and Beirne note, university lecture spaces and timetabling have never been particularly suited to this special disciplinary need that sits outside of traditional academic learning formats (79). While online asynchronic screenings have offered greater access to some films, and indeed greater accessibility to some films through closed captions and greater control over sensory experience (volume and light levels, the ability to control screen time), the range of films and screen texts that can be accessed for course digital ‘delivery’ is considerably smaller. Further, film studies academics in Australian universities report a jumble of problems and constraints ranging from issues around technical accessibility (what is required to stream a title; who has access to the required software, hardware, and internet speeds to stream a title); title availability (not everything is available for streaming); and engagement (the radically different spatio-temporal frameworks and dynamics for discussion and debate that arise from asynchronic, small screen viewing, often competing and intertwined with other activities and distractions, as explored by Kannas et al.).

Building on the existing scholarship in this area, we argue that the resourcing of film studies programs that determines access to films for screening in the streaming era is impacted by two key factors: first, the general decline in funding for humanities programs; and second, the familiarity of cinema. The first relates to the way university libraries often play a key role in determining what can be made available for course screenings. While humanities-based librarians are often very aware of the requirements of film/screen studies teaching, this is not always the case when it comes to those who have decision making control over library budget allocations. This is because film titles for teaching and for research, whether purchased or rented, generally come out of library budgets. University libraries are also often also left with responsibility for digitizing films for courses, though they aren’t always provided with the resources required to do so.

The second relates to three observable assumptions about cinema that now inform a ‘commonsense’ understanding of the medium in higher education. These assumptions are that:

(1) more films are available to viewers than ever before, and they are accessible at the touch of a finger.

(2) for the purposes of a film studies course, films are largely interchangeable.

(3) differences between versions and formats of a film title (including versions for different film classification releases, cross-media transfers, and other post-release changes) are of no real significance.

These three assumptions could be thought of as the fantasy of abundance, the presumption of interchangeability, and the perceived insignificance of form and format. None of these assumptions about film availability and screenings are unique to university administrators, or to the digital turn in cinema and the rise of online learning. However, the presence and pervasiveness of these assumptions or fallacies in research and teaching institutions in the current era is, we argue, significantly influencing budgetary decisions around resources and therefore impact on programs, student learning and engagement, and the life and future of a field.

The first of these assumptions—the fantasy of abundance—seems to underlie the low priority given to resourcing or even recognising the screening needs of film studies courses and programs. University administrators often assume that streaming platforms assist, enhance and streamline the teaching of film studies and that the era of BVOD (broadcast video on demand) and SVOD (streaming video on demand—commercial platforms, social media entertainment) has created easy access to a seemingly endless range and supply of films, while also giving students more opportunities to immerse themselves in course films in ‘their own time’. As a result, it can be concluded that borrowing or purchasing titles for course use is no longer required in the same ways it has been previously. And it is not surprising that this assumption is so widespread. After all, streaming platforms present themselves as key players in and shapers of an ever-expanding virtual world of cinema-on-tap, in which easy accessibility and unlimited choice are the central currency. But despite the rhetoric about living in an age of boundless media, streaming platforms can actually trigger the shrinking availability of film titles, ever-increasing paywalls, and levels of indifference to copy/version quality or format that can render a work unrecognisable. While the shift to online screenings can certainly offer opportunities to access some screen texts that might otherwise not be available to a class—particularly through non-commercial repositories such as the Internet Archive and initiatives like the Women Film Pioneers Project where paywalls do not preclude access—it is more often the case that we are dealing with a reduced rather than an expanded field.

The second assumption—the presumption of interchangeability—also underlies the apparent deprioritizing of the discipline’s teaching and research requirements. As university libraries adjust the scope of their subscription arrangements with ‘content providers’ such as Kanopy, course films can become unavailable from one term to the next. In our experience, when access to a film is lost in this way, this is often met with advice or instruction to pick something else to screen. This can be the case regardless of whether we are talking about an experimental film from the American underground film movements of the 1970s that pushed assumptions about the boundaries of the medium, a genre re-defining Australian film by a First Nations director, a critically acclaimed feature by a celebrated Brazilian director, a classical Hollywood woman’s film from the 1930s, or a documentary from (for instance) Canada, Colombia, Cambodia, or China.

The third assumption identified above—the perceived insignificance of form and format—predates the digital turn and intersects with and extends beyond cinephile panics about the state and future of cinema. Understanding that a film may have been released and/or circulate in a variety of forms and formats not only for different audiences, but also, in their remediation, for different media (for instance changes to aspect ratio to make ‘suitable’ for a different kind of screen) is an important topic in film and screen studies teaching and relates to film and television histories, technologies and distribution contexts. Questioning the perceived insignificance of form and format, particularly in terms of a film or other screen text’s remediation, is for this reason, frequently part of film and screen studies learning. We include this assumption around differences in form and format as being largely insignificant here, however, because it has acquired a renewed hold in the era of online teaching. Cheaper options of a title will generally be what is made available for a course, even when, for instance, it may be a version that has been significantly edited or re-formatted, as for instance when the version of a film that is made available for streaming is a version that had been recorded from a television broadcast—with ‘content’ edited to meet broadcast requirements—through an educational video streaming platform.

Each of these assumptions—that more films are more readily available, and that films, formats and versions are interchangeable—impact most immediately on how programs are resourced to make screen texts available to students, and how they are encouraged and enabled to engage with them. As mentioned, the transition to streamed screenings has not received the same level of attention and institutional resourcing given to hybrid lectures and tutorials, which, in many large Australian universities, has involved comprehensive programs of instructional material from educational designers on how to best use the technology that enables this teaching (Zoom, Teams, Panopto, Padlet, Poll Everywhere etc.) and valuable pedagogical suggestions on how to transition face-to-face teaching practices online in an inclusive manner. Much of this advice concerns the how of online teaching - i.e., how to make course content available to students in the most dynamic and engaging way. As the authors of ‘When Zoom Replaces the Cinema’ (2021) note, no such advice has been focused on the disciplinary specifics of film studies, however, where the most basic question—how will students access and watch a text—is largely left up to individual academics to handle.

These academics face numerous issues and obstacles. Commercial SVODs such as Netflix, Stan and Disney + do not offer institutional licences in Australia, so material on these services is automatically made unavailable for streaming to students within university ecosystems. One can of course simply direct students to their personal SVOD profiles to watch course content, but this directive presents significant and privileged assumptions about students’ financial and domestic situations. Moreover, it presents obvious imperialist problems for those teaching students based offshore in countries like China, where ‘global’ platforms like Netflix are either not available or offer a very different range of material. University libraries can subscribe to educationally focused platforms such as Kanopy, Informit EduTV and DocPlay, but these services often charge expensive institutional licences that librarians frequently come to academics to make a case for paying and maintaining over time. More significantly, relying upon these services necessarily skews assigned content toward the material most fully available on the platform. Kanopy, for instance, operates on a ‘strategic streaming video acquisition’ system that invites librarians to ‘diversify models for the greatest return on investment’ - signing up for only portions of the catalogue based on need. What this means in practice is that a given title can appear to be available on Kanopy but actually require a great deal of communication and (again) justification with a librarian or administrator to secure, and frequently not in time for a course’s topic.

Relying upon a service like Kanopy also of course limits the content that can be assigned for screening to what the platform has ‘curated’ in the first place. The question of how and why content is made available in a given catalogue shapes all streaming platforms, but with more niche services that are targeted at educators and ‘film lovers’ like Kanopy, DocPlay, MUBI and Criterion Collection the choices and assumptions underpinning content curation are particularly explicit and important. These platforms are styled less as an apparently limitless array of choices for any viewer and any taste (like Netflix) and more as a handpicked list of ‘important’ content that any self-respecting film student or enthusiast ‘should’ see. The platform, in this way, is styled much in the way of a film festival or, indeed, a film studies academic. While this position holds a lot of potential for general screen education and appreciation, the choices of these taste-makers—especially on Kanopy, the service most targeted to universities—are generally quite conservative. The platform privileges a lot of traditional educational documentaries assigned to various high profile social topics (‘gender studies’, ‘race, ethnicity and identity’, ‘LGBTQ + studies’) and canonical or award-winning film ‘masterpieces’ that significantly over-represents male directors. The ‘Film Studies 101’ category for example—a name that foregrounds the role of the platform-as-professor—showcases films by Andrei Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergman, Roman Polanski, John Cassavetes, Alain Resnais and Frederick Wiseman. In ‘Asian Cinema’ we find films by Wong Kar-Wai, Edward Yang, Bong Joon Ho, Satyajit Ray and Park Chan Wook. The message is very clear: ‘great cinema’ is the domain of the male auteur, a position that feminist film studies has carefully unpacked and corrected for decades. None of this is to say that the films available in these categories are not important and valuable for teaching. But the individuated content that film studies as a discipline relies upon to intervene in the narrative of male authorship is not reliably available on a platform like Kanopy. This content, then, is effectively unavailable to screen for students. By favouring existing and market-tested canons, reliance on platforms like Kanopy can further entrench those films as the films that matter and the biases of the predominantly white male cultures that have privileged them.

At a time when many academics in the humanities are already running on empty after years of budget cuts, increased workload, staff losses and (for most) the aftermath of a hectic transition to online during pandemic shutdowns, navigating the reduced and precarious availability of films for teaching can require a level of creative thinking and troubleshooting that is hard to summon once, let alone maintain. One of the easiest ways of dealing with the problem is to work with pre-packaged material, structuring courses around resources such as Bloomsbury’s ‘dynamic digital platform’ on Screen Studies, which includes books, screenplays, overview articles and learning resources via annual subscription. While many of these teaching packages and resources are excellent, they can reduce the scope and specificity of what can be taught and bias the curriculum in the same ways that curated streaming platforms can. Using such ‘suggestions’ can also end up perpetuating the assumption of endless availability that is part of the problem by obscuring the problem of inaccessible content rather than encouraging reflection on this issue.

But as we will go on to discuss, perhaps one upside of this environment is that it can create opportunities to (re)introduce areas of research and debate that have come to have less of a hold in the film studies syllabus—questions around media ownership, for instance, and around different uses of cinema and accessibility. In a short piece on teaching cinema studies that was written around 10 years ago now, US film scholar Timothy Corrigan discussed the problems and opportunities that can come with teaching a field that students already feel familiar with. ‘It might not be surprising that film studies attracts students who often assume they know the field being taught, but my guess is that many other disciplines—from literary studies, physics and history to psychology, communications and sociology—face similar issues regarding how to take advantage of that presumed familiarity and confidence and to make that familiar material and experiences unfamiliar in critical ways’ [emphasis added] (Corrigan, 2015). While it is certainly not the only way to do so, the on-campus course screening has often been a key way that film and screen studies scholars have ‘made familiar material and experiences and unfamiliar in critical ways’. As course film screenings move to the same devices and platforms on which students watch most films and moving images already, and a course’s curated film screenings sit alongside other SVOD and BVOD screening ‘recommendations’, how might those experiences be made ‘unfamiliar in critical ways’ to give students greater access to, understanding of, and indeed freedom in the discipline? Thinking about how the ‘presumed familiarity’ of cinema in the age of streaming impacts on and can be mobilised in course design, and how to use the fragmented and fragmentary mode of viewing that characterises so much contemporary screen viewing to create different ways of engaging with film texts in teaching, is the focus of the next two sections.

Part 2: Missing movies

In 2022 a group of predominantly North American filmmakers, media lawyers, independent distributors, media archivists and cinephiles created the organisation Missing Movies to address the increasing disappearance and inaccessibility of film titles in the streaming era. Created and led by a group that includes filmmakers Mary Harron and Nancy Savoca and entertainment lawyer Susan Bodine, the Missing Movies team has been drawing attention to the impact of streaming services and the increasing consolidation of media ownership on what can be seen/accessed.

As stated in the Missing Movies Manifesto:

The truth is that movies are simply not as available today as they were during the heyday of VHS when some brick-and-mortar video stores carried tens of thousands of titles. Now, with a few giant companies controlling the most popular streaming services and trying to outdo one another with original content, many older movies are being left behind.

Thousands of movies are either completely lost or are deemed too small to warrant the expense, and thus are completely unavailable. This is especially true of work created by women and members of the BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and disability communities. AS a result, we end up with a skewed history of filmmaking and crucial gaps in our cultural knowledge and legacy.

While much of their focus has been around locating prints and film rights, the issues that Missing Movies raises around the forms of unavailability that have resulted from the rise of streaming services and media conglomerates, and the uneven impact of this, connects directly to the questions on teaching film studies that we signalled in the first part of this paper. While access to films is by no means a new issue in film and screen studies, what is notable here is that the Missing Movies team are talking about films that students would think of as popular cinema, the kinds of films in fact that are presumed to be readily available. The team provides their definition of a missing movie on their website: ‘The simplest definition is a movie that cannot be seen by the general public in the most accessible, legally available formats’. Elaborating on what this means they write, ‘In 2022, this would be a movie that is not available on any streaming service. It might be a film that has physically disappeared but also includes films that are only available on VHS, out-of-print DVD, 16 mm or 35 mm print. In all these cases, the films are “missing” from the public discourse’. Unlike some of the other film preservation groups and organisations that have primarily been concerned with what students might think of as ‘really old’ films, Missing Movies highlights and addresses the problems around what we are calling the fantasy of abundance - the popular assumptions, shared by many students and universities, that streaming has brought with it unprecedented access to a boundless living archive of cinema/film titles.

Further, the coupling of these two words—missing and movies—also gives name to a feeling and a state that has quietly become part of the experience of teaching film and screen media more broadly. Film studies academics have been missing movies as a key component of teaching and our relation to and investment in the field, and missing movie screenings as a part of film studies teaching that can bring people together to create, critique, collaborate and wonder. For us here then missing movies involves multiple and overlapping forms of missing cinema, from films that are seemingly ‘lost’ to teaching, to forms of teaching and engaging with films and cinema that are ‘lost’ to film studies. This is not to deny or downplay the value of the forms of engagement possible through digital modes, from Laura Mulvey’s delayed spectatorship (Mulvey, 2006) to Netflix’s Teleparty. Rather it is to argue that greater space and thought needs to be given to how to mobilise in teaching the potential of the streaming environment for dynamic, creative engagement with screen texts and culture, including the transitory, ephemeral quality of the medium that this moment highlights.

The logic of ‘missing’ outlined above is evident in compelling ways in the manner in which students are encountering and consuming streamed screenings. On one hand, where films are available to assign online, this mode of delivery undoubtedly improves the likelihood that students will click the supplied link and watch at least some of the content. This availability and convenience are what students refer to when they say that they prefer online screenings—assigned content is there for them with the sense of convenience, immediacy and abundance that the internet has trained them to expect. This is a mode of delivery that is understood and familiar.

This familiarity, though, obviously endangers the experience of the cinematic apparatus that film studies has long understood as a basis for ‘ideal’ critical spectatorship. Data collected from a small sample (n = 46) of primarily second- and third-year students taking Film and Screen Studies core units at one of our institutions in Semester 2, 2022 confirmed that they consume streamed screenings via the LMS in an isolated, distracted and partial way. Supporting the findings of Kannas et al., this study found that 59% of students indicated that they ‘always’ look at the assigned weekly screening before class, but only 46% of students said they watch the full film or tv episode(s). 80% watch on a laptop computer and 85% watch alone, and almost all admitted to not giving the screening their full attention—only 6% responded ‘never’ to the question ‘when watching an assigned screening online do you do other things at the same time?’. The survey also showed that it is normal for students to ‘skim watch’ assigned screenings at 2x speed or faster—only 11% of respondents indicated that they ‘never’ do this.

This data confirms many assumptions around how the viewer ‘pulls’ non-linear screen content towards themselves in the age of streaming, rather than having linear material ‘pushed’ on them by distributors and broadcasters. Specifically, it emphasises the viewer’s agency and power to choose, and the levels of autonomy, control and participation introduced by ‘the Netflix Effect’ (Jenner, 2018; Lotz, 2014; McDonald and Smith Rowsey, 2016; Tryon, 2013). Some of the student comments to the question ‘what do you do at the same time as watching the screening?’ make this shift particularly clear:

“sometimes I look at social media or other online websites when I don’t find the show as engaging. Other times, I quickly look at the prescribed readings to understand more about the show, or specific scenes”

‘Sometimes if a film is conceptual, or theme based, you understand what they are doing pretty quickly and it just becomes a bit repetitive. Almost as if the design isn’t neatly packaged well enough to justify full attention—and you can apply the theory to the technique of that one or beginning scene (sic) already watched’

Responses to the question ‘do you ever “skim watch” assigned screenings—i.e., watch at 2x speed or faster’ are also revealing:

‘Usually with a slow moving film / something that’s not my taste or a foreign film’

‘I don’t really but I will skip forward if I believe a scene is long and doesn’t contribute to the emotion or meaning of the scene’

‘If the film is a bit boring (i.e., Jeanne Dielman) then it’s sped up’

Clearly, students are no longer watching an uninterrupted screening selected and introduced by their lecturer as an assigned task that is essential to the course, as film studies has historically been taught. They are instead choosing if and how to watch the screening week to week depending on their schedule and their personal interest in the material. This shift suggests that assigned screenings are becoming another piece of ‘content’ for students, where the film or tv series to be watched can easily become just one more screen text available to students amongst an ocean of online material. As the above comments indicate, the LMS through which the assigned screening is delivered is invariably open alongside other platforms, arguably making the act of watching an event associated with entertainment and leisure rather than study and learning. The educator effectively becomes like the algorithm: serving up ‘suggested’ content for students that they may or may not choose to pay attention to.

It is not our intention here to chastise students for not ‘properly’ paying attention. What is more interesting for our purposes is to consider how ‘missing’ online screenings in the sense described here is an effect of the very viewing practices that streaming encourages, and to reflect on what this might mean—good and bad—for the future of film studies. These questions all concern the material culture around film and television, which, as Caetlin Benson-Allott notes, ‘changes how we make sense of their content, not to mention the very concepts film and television’. In her book The Stuff of Spectatorship, Benson-Allott coins the term ‘transient viewing’ to describe the form of ‘shallow spectatorship’ that video-on-demand platforms enable by ‘[smoothing] out differences of production, distribution, and access, making all content available in the same way’ (2021: 23). When (partially) seen at home, alone, on a laptop, an assigned screening is absorbed into this smooth space of everyday viewing - a space of information capitalism that, as Hito Steyerl describes, ‘[thrives] on compressed attention spans, on impression rather than immersion, on intensity rather than contemplation, on previews rather than screenings’ (2012: 42).

What place might this ‘shallow spectatorship’ and ‘transient viewing’ have in teaching film studies? In encouraging and cultivating a curious, contemplative and interrogative gaze? How, in other words, can ‘missing’ a screening as a result of seeing it in a smoothed or shallow manner relate to longing for cinema, for a film to be felt and experienced in a distinctive and differentiated way? While this form of viewing is certainly an object of study in research on what is variously called postcinema and streaming video, there has been less reflection on its place in, impact on, and possibilities for teaching.

Part of what is at stake here is considering how forms of filmic experience and experiences of cinema are part of the very means of teaching in film studies. The social history of cinema going and reflections on the ‘filmic experience’ and its evolution over time are significant objects of study in film studies (Bowles, 2007; Casetti, 2009; Hansen, 1991; Kuhn et al., 2017; Maltby et al., 2011; Maltby et al., 2014). But the way these experiences shape how film studies is taught and learned has received and continues to receive less attention. Francesco Casetti has analysed ‘new forms of access to filmic experience’ and the ‘relocation of the filmic experience as it finds new media, new environments and adjusts and responds to the appeal of a new historical and cultural situation’ (2009: 62–64). But the under-resourcing of film studies’ screening requirements discussed above often means that rather than dealing with what Casetti calls the relocation of the filmic experience from the communal classroom to the personal device (a relocation that can often result in the sense of a dissipation in time and space of the class as audience and the audience as a class) we are instead dealing with the displacement of both film (viewing) and filmic experience from film studies teaching.

To really consider both the challenges and potential of a genuine relocation, we need to understand what can be ‘missed’ in the shift from collective to asynchronic solo viewing. Understanding film viewing as a social experience means privileging what it means to watch with others, where collective spectatorship functions as a context that enables specific meanings and encounters to occur. To take an obvious case, the experience of sitting with others through Jeanne/Delphine Seyrig’s real-time domestic routines in Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975) - hearing and sensing the restlessness, the shifts and breaths, the uncertainty, and the walk-outs of others in the room - underlines the duration, mundanity and essential build-up of the work. Film viewing as an embodied experience is here accentuated not just by the apparatus but by the presence and absence of others, who inspire a reception that is open and dynamic; an encounter that is more than a straightforward transmission of information. One way to interpret the affect at work here is as a sense of wonder, what Sara Ahmed describes as ‘the means by which other possibilities open up … wonder expands our field of vision and touch … wonder means learning to see the world as something that does not have to be … wonder implies learning’ (2014: 180–183). As a key theme in feminist pedagogy, wonder has also been theorised by bell hooks as an element of critical thinking that is ‘mindful and aware … The ability to be awed, excited, and inspired by ideas is a practice that radically opens the mind’ (2010: 188).

How, then, might we find and utilise wonder in transient engagement? Our concerns here are less about the loss or displacement of particular kinds of spectatorship—which can foster forms of what Sarah Keller has described as ‘anxious cinephilia’—and more about the changing experiences of screen media more broadly in this age of boundless media. As Keller reminds us, cinema ‘is a mercurial medium, and its magic, such as it is, depends on fickle spectators who watch and obsess in different ways’ (2020: 1). Cinema’s ephemerality and (perhaps always) uncertain future has been creatively taken up in reflections on cinephilia as an anxiety over losing something virtual, and this essential quality - the ‘non-object of moving images’ (Keller, 2020: 228) - has always posed particular kinds of challenges in and for teaching film studies. But how might this specific moment, when cinema’s ephemerality and accessibility are taking new and evolving forms - from the loss of film lending libraries to the growth of pop-up online festivals and screening groups - be both conceptualised and critically embraced in terms of what and how film studies is taught? The next section is concerned with the potential of this new ephemerality, including if and how ‘shallow’ or ‘smooth’ forms of engagement and spectatorship can be both defamiliarised and historicised in the classroom, how other modes of engagement/spectatorship can be enabled, and the kinds of film ‘encounters’ that are possible when teaching film studies online.

Part 3: Teaching unseen films and ephemeral cinema

Inspiration can be taken here from how, in other areas of screen culture, remote viewing and online screenings have been dynamically and enthusiastically embraced. In her editorial for a 2020 issue of Film Quarterly, B. Ruby Rich wrote about the flourishing online screen culture that was emerging in response to the Covid lockdowns and restrictions of the time. While across the globe, cinemas variously had to close their doors (sometimes forever) or significantly limit capacity, online film festivals, smaller curated programs and innovative online screening events were appearing and creating new or renewed online viewing communities and new forms of ‘virtual cinema’ (Walsh, 2021). ²

The shift to online, so fraught only a few months ago, has become more and more accomplished. It is second nature now to schedule online Q&As, premieres, screenings at favorite venues, playlists on services like Criterion Channel or TCM, or even to watch movies together with friends on Netflix Party or other platforms. Hybrid forms are evolving every week (Rich, 2020: 5).

But the innovations in and possibilities for creating and participating in this emerging ‘virtual cinema’ can be a long way from what is happening or possible in teaching, where limitations in (staff) time, budget, and access can make such leaps feel near impossible. Rich titled her editorial ‘The Screening Life, Once Removed’, playing on the double sense of once removed—as copy (cinema online—cinema at one remove) and as erased, taken away, absent. As we’ve argued, film studies programs are experiencing this same double sense of screenings at one remove. Not everything is available in digital form—and not everything is the same in digitised form (for instance, wonderful as it may be to watch Stan Brakhage’s 1963 film Mothlight in digitised form, some of the wonder of this camera-less film can be lost in its projection-less life on a monitor). In addition, as data collected from students shows, the shift to online can also result in a kind of flattening of the film screenings within a course as they become lost in the array of streaming options students regularly engage with or move across in their daily lives. If the first point acknowledges the number and kinds of films that will likely remain unseen and structured out of a course due to their unavailability for streaming, the second acknowledges that the shift to online screenings can also result in many of a course’s films-for-discussion being left unwatched.

It is somewhat ironic that in this age of so-called boundless media, films that will likely remain unseen and unwatched play such a big role in so many aspects of teaching, from course design to classroom debate. If in teaching, the ‘screening life’ often feels to have simply been removed rather than being at one remove or renewed, as in the new online life Rich and others have discussed, what might centring this removal and its various absences offer to teaching film? At a time when on demand availability is often assumed as the norm in and for screen culture, what if we made more space for teaching the films we can’t see? And how might teaching unseeable films also reframe the familiar problem of teaching films that students have left unwatched? Part of the ‘work’ of teaching film today includes addressing the misconception that we have never had greater access to so many films and, for this reason, teaching unseen and unavailable films—rather than simply opting for something ‘available’—has potential for enabling critical reflection on the ways screen culture is consumed (or to go back to Corrigan, teaching unseen and unavailable films—in and through their unavailability—can make ‘familiar material and experiences unfamiliar in critical ways’). At the same time, in a screen culture in which ‘impression’ rather than ‘immersion’ is more often the dominant mode of engagement, shifting attention to what is not there, and not available, can introduce something that might come a little closer to the possibility of wonder or, at the least, surprise.

Contemporary film and screen studies have already embraced various forms of what we might call ‘un’ cinema. The unfinished, the unmade, and what we might call the unloved have all—and rightly—made claims for their place in the field. Each is an object of study and area of enquiry, informing research in film history and film historiography, industry analysis, paracinema studies, as well as textual analysis and authorship studies. As a loose and malleable term for films that could have been, the specific category of ‘unmade films’ or ‘unmade cinema’ embraces projects that stalled on completion (the unreleased/unscreened), in production (the unfinished, thwarted or abandoned), or in transition from conception to pre-production. James Fenwick et al.’s umbrella term for the various forms of unmade cinema is ‘shadow cinema’, a term he borrows from Peter Kramer, to consider how the material remains of the unmade provide film historians and theorists with valuable material for understanding how opportunities and resources are distributed in the screen industries and in cultural archives (Fenwick et al., 2022). Studying unmade films is in this way recognised as offering rich terrain for understanding everything from the economics of risk and built in ‘waste’ in commercial/capitalist film industries to the chequered or interrupted paths of individual, and in particular minority, filmmakers. ³ What does the study of unseen cinema offer the discipline in these times of streamed course screenings and commercial screen studies teaching video archives and catalogues?

To borrow the title of Adam Zmith’s podcast, teaching ‘the film we can’t see’ might in fact offer a productive way of teaching critical spectatorship in the streaming era—enabling richer engagement with questions around canon formation and the relations between cultural value, screen culture, and academic scholarship as well as around the shifting forms and meanings of film, cinema, and the cinematic. The category of unseen cinema might sit alongside, and at points include some of these other categories defined by the ‘un’ or the ‘not’ but is distinctive in that it prioritises a shift on the part of the viewer—a shift in where we look. This shift has value because it can turn attention to the worlds of the overlooked, unmade, forgotten and unfinished—all those shadow cinemas that can enable critical reflection on the valued and the circulated. But it can also enable us to think critically and imaginatively about the different spaces, frames and contexts through which films are viewed and made meaningful. Such a shift would build on and resonate with the work of feminist media artists, media activists, and film historians (and feminist films like Cheryl Dunye’s Watermelon Woman [1996]) that have critically and dynamically engaged with the forms of loss and erasure that have coursed through the histories of women’s and BIPOC and LGBTQI + filmmaking, screen culture and viewing practices and attachments. Shifting the focus to unseen films, we argue, would not only enable new approaches to and engagement with feminist film historiography but would also enable critical engagement with screen culture more broadly, including the relations between the watched and the unwatched. Such a shift can draw attention to the relationship between access and canon formation in ways that may lead to generative debate in and about film and screen studies, including around the relationships between film history, film and screen studies, and film theory. As we have outlined, this task requires unsettling what we have identified as three recurrent fallacies or fantasies about the availability of screen media texts and the requirements of film and screen studies teaching programs—the assumptions of easy and abundant availability of films and other screen texts, of their interchangeability, and of platform and media neutrality. This is where making space for unseen cinema can prove valuable—not, we stress, as a replacement for all course screenings, but rather to renew engagement with films and other screen texts and with the discipline itself.

Our provocation then is that we actively incorporate unseen cinema into our teaching. Teaching the absent and the unavailable has long been a dynamic and often necessary part of teaching feminist and queer film histories and work by BIPOC filmmakers that is less readily available. Turning attention to the unavailable, the overlooked, and the lost can highlight and unsettle cultural, intellectual and archival biases and draw to the fore other histories, desires, ways of being. For these reasons, such turns to the unavailable, overlooked and lost have had, and continue to have, an important place in decolonising the film studies curriculum. Replacing or complementing the unwatched or the partially watched (categories that seem to be doing well in this new world of online course screenings) with space for the study of unseen cinema can enable a more critical engagement with what can be seen. Introducing more forms of unseen cinema into the film studies curriculum—as a necessary and increasingly important part of teaching film studies—can also bring film theory back into the light. At times like the present when academic programs are increasingly required to pitched in the language of industry-ready graduates, the words ‘film theory’ are often sidelined in film studies programs, kept in the wings like a relative not brought to every family gathering. But film theory—which has often been the lifeblood of film studies—remains critical. As Kyle Stevens reminds us, film theory’s value ‘lies not solely in evaluating or understanding films and filmic technique but in understanding culture and its institutions’ (2022: 7) and as such should be part of, if not inseparable from, some of the more favoured terms (‘industry-ready’; engaged research; applied research) that circulate in film/screen studies and humanities programs today.

How might forms of unseen cinema be incorporated into the teaching of film studies in ways that might energise discussion and debate and lead to a more inquisitive engagement with cinema in its many forms? Here are a few ways that unseen cinema is, and can be, mobilised in the classroom:

Students imagine or reconstruct a film that is lost or otherwise unavailable from its remaining or available fragments and present their imagined (version of the) film in visual, sonic or spoken/performed form;

Engaging solely with reviews and critical scholarship on a class nominated (and topic relevant) unavailable film, students make a case for why it should be available and in what form and on what platform.

Students create (or re-create) a screening/exhibition site and reception and discussion context for a film/screen text (available or unavailable) that sits outside the more readily available material for a course or discipline topic (for instance: a video activist work; an experimental film that doesn’t fit into a neat course screening time slot –e.g., too long/too short; a banned film).

Using a resource such as the ‘Missing Movies’ website to identify a suitable film, students track (detective-style) the distribution history of a film to locate when, where and how it became permanently or temporarily unseeable and use their findings to explore questions around media ownership and/or canon formation.

Examining a film only through the clips, images and soundbites from it that can be found on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram or similar, students use these materials to explore changing modes of film viewing, narrative form, intermediality, and the shifting economic structure of the screen industries.

Students are asked to design and develop a lesson, event, or document (for instance a catalogue essay or program notes) around an unavailable film or group of films that they have identified through topic research as significant, and outline how the inclusion of their chosen films in the course might expand or trouble a key concept in the discipline.

Film studies already offers rich material to work with, and from, for such class activities, for, in various forms, these kinds of research and critical thinking practices and methods are already part of the film and screen studies discipline - in work on cinema memories for instance (to mention some key examples: Jackie Stacey’s early work on film stars (1994); Annette Kuhn’s work on cinema-going memories (2017); Victor Burgin’s work on ‘the remembered film’ (2004) and cinema histories that have been lost or marginalised in the archive, such as Anna Everett’s groundbreaking work on early black film criticism in the US for instance (2018). Such work, which often, by design or necessity, works with or from films that may remain unseen, has been central to the discipline of film studies as the study of both films and other screen texts and of cinema more broadly. Choosing to teach from unseen films might, ironically, create more space and motivation for students to critically engage with the films and screen culture that are readily available.

Taught in these ways, unseen cinema can be an exercise in speculation—an approach with a rich tradition in feminist media histories. As Allyson Nadia Field writes, as ‘a method for thinking about questions of material loss and inaccessibility in new ways’, speculation is a way of challenging what counts as evidence and knowledge by ‘engaging the absent’ and ‘training a lens on the unseeable’ (2022: 3). In the context of media history, the strategy resists organising scholarship around extant material, or media that survives: ‘film history is a history of survivors, written at the expense of alternative voices and practices that risk being dismissed or marginalized if we can’t readily access them’ (Field, 2022: 3). This approach has specific relevance for the world of online screenings, for what are the new systems of online delivery and attention described above but contemporary mechanisms for shaping what survives in direct and powerful ways? Field and other feminist film and media historians working in this mode primarily mobilise the speculative to address ‘archival silence’, where work has been lost, marginalized or forgotten. As we’ve described, a related kind of erasure is evident in a digital environment where media is made inaccessible; it may exist but it is not transmissible and can thereby become ‘lost’ to our film studies programs in other ways. But, as we’ve also shown, what survives–and doesn’t–is also impacted by the current world of ‘archival abundance’, what Lauren Berliner calls the ‘uniformly flat and vast’ landscape of digital artifacts, where issues of volume, platforms, data analytics and algorithms all shape the format, form and content of what and how media now circulates (2022: 222). ‘Engaging the absent’ and ‘training a lens on the unseeable’ in the manner outlined above necessarily requires thinking about how we look and how we view. In this respect teaching unseen films can serve to generate and inform discussion around the ‘survivor bias’ of film history and its relations to our media industries and also, importantly, ignite forms of creative engagement. Doing this work is a way of engaging what Jane Gaines calls ‘feminist counterfactuality’. Gaines writes that the critical capacity of the counterfactual problematic is its ‘“estrangement” of what may be perceived as the actuality of events: ‘counterfactuality entertains the possibility that under another set of circumstances (or a different set of actors), events might have delivered other outcomes, the consequences of which might have reverberated differently’ (2022: 10).

Conclusion

In 2022, the Screen Studies Association of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand (SSAAANZ) commissioned some short pieces on the ‘state of play for screen studies in the era of Covid-19’. Writing from Spain, where he has worked for some time, outside of the university system, Australian screen and media scholar Adrian Martin was upbeat about some aspects of the new normal and the ‘positive upheaval’ effected at the level of access to the screen materials we study. He also spoke, though, to ‘an outsider’s sense, from the network of everyone I know and everything I read and hear every day, and from my own previous university experience, of the ongoing crisis in the field’ (Martin, 2022). Missy Molloy from Victoria University of Wellington | Te Herenga Waka, Aotearoa/New Zealand was more explicit in highlighting the many losses—intellectual, personal, educational, cultural, political—that this moment has entailed. ‘As screen studies academics, we are no doubt at a crossroads’ Molloy writes. ‘Yet it’s not clear that there are any solutions available beyond those manifest in what has become known as the Great Resignation. In other words, the only solution may be to jump ship. Staying the course, by contrast, will require a level of vocational faith and commitment that is hard to come by in academic circles today, even among those who rode out the pandemic in full-time gigs’ (Molloy, 2022). Molloy’s paper is a striking and refreshing intervention, and we bring it into our discussion here because its attention to what and who is being lost during this period of crisis in the humanities, and what might be required to come through it, resonates with the issues we have raised. Equally, her call for a renewal of ‘vocational faith and commitment’ speaks to the potential of what she calls ‘the tasks at hand-- namely the recuperation of job satisfaction and the recalibration of our field in a changing culture. Overhauling what and how we teach seems more to the point’. (Molloy, 2022, emphasis added).

Both the media contexts and environments in which films and other screen-based text circulate (or not), and the university contexts and environments in which we teach, have changed in profound ways over the last decade. As we have discussed, key factors and forces include (i) the reduction of available titles for teaching when one is limited to the digitised form; (ii) the tendency towards syllabus packaging and standardisation as academic publishers branch out into film title educational distribution; (iii) streamed course screenings becoming one of a series of streamable options for students, as a result leaving many course films unwatched; and (iv) a lack of adequate resourcing of university libraries to support film teaching and the loss of audio visual librarians as specialists. These factors have together entailed the loss of a familiar and (potentially) dynamic space for engagement and debate, often leaving in its wake a form of engagement with the film screening that takes the form of being alone together or at other times together alone. In posing the provocation of unseen cinema as a method for teaching critical film studies here, we are by no means advocating for the end of course screenings. Our aim, rather, is to push back against the under-resourcing of screenings and the devaluing of screen texts more broadly in our teaching programs by proposing that the ephemeral situation of contemporary course screenings are actively incorporated into how we teach film studies and critical spectatorship. As we have argued, when key components of film studies teaching move online—and film screenings are, for us, a key component—this shift impacts what can be taught and how it is taught, and while this shift is not necessarily or inevitably one of loss, it is a transition that can have significant impacts for screen education. Making that transition work requires adequate resourcing—academics’ time, expertise/knowledge of the field, and institutional investment in accessing the films/screening materials required. Building on Molloy’s call for an overhaul of what and how we teach film studies and for the resourcing required to undertake this task and its various components, we suggest that advocating for and prioritising the unseen and the ephemeral might be one way to recalibrate the field and recuperate some job satisfaction.