DJOYMI BAKER: The lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated the closure of cinema theatres, and for academics such as me, who would normally teach cinema studies on campus at universities, the temporary end to weekly film screenings for students on the big screen. Instead, our “film of the week” had to shift to streaming at home on a variety of devices. As the lockdowns lifted (in late October 2021 here in Melbourne, Australia, which had the longest in the world)[i] —and our university gradually moved from fully online, to hybrid, to fully on campus—the split among student viewing practices have been felt in the cinema and the classroom.
Last year, we screened F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), the story of an un-named Man (George O’Brien) who is tempted by The Woman from the City (Margaret Livingston), to the distress of his Wife (Janet Gaynor). Sunrise is a transitional film that sits between the silent era and the sound era, in that it has written intertitles rather than dialogue, but features a synchronised soundtrack with a score and sound effects. It also displays innovative cinematography, particularly in the famous marsh scene during which the camera is “suspended from overhead cables so that it glides” through the set.[ii] Recalling this shot, Murnau proclaimed: “To me the camera represents the eye of a person, through whose mind one is watching the events on the screen. It must follow characters at times into difficult places… It must whirl and peep and move from place to place as swiftly as thought itself.”[iii] These features were recognised at the inaugural Academy Awards in 1929, where it won the “Most Unique and Artistic Picture,” despite having been a commercial failure.[iv] More recently, Sunrise was voted number 11 in Sight and Sound’s 2022 poll of “critics, programmers, curators, archivists and academics” for “The Greatest Films of All Time.”[v]
It nonetheless came as a surprise to me that students spontaneously applauded at the end of the screening, something that did not occur for any other film in the course. Many of our students have little or indeed no exposure to silent or early sound films, so it does require an adjustment to their regular viewing expectations. The setting was particularly apt in this instance, being the ornate Capitol Theatre, built in 1924, a silent era “picture palace” once hailed as “the best cinema that has ever been built or is ever likely to be built.”[vi] Picture palaces were attractions in their own right. Nearly a century later, COVID brought renewed focus on the physical and social experience of the cinema theatre. Wheeler Winston Dixon, writing in 2020, lamented that streaming cannot “make up for the absence of an audience, real-life human contact, and seeing a film on a large theatre screen, as it’s supposed to be shown.”[vii]
Many of our students share this notion of the theatrical film ideal. In a study conducted during COVID in 2020 and 2021, my colleagues Alexia Kannas, James Douglas, and James Thompson found that “students tended to associate the lack of timetabled screenings with a decline in their engagement levels.”[viii] Yet streaming at home also provided students with some valued affordances, such as pausing or rewinding, which in some cases students felt aided their understanding.[ix]
The theatre may persist as an ideal, but statistically it no longer prevails. Writing back in 2015, Brett Mills points out, “the dominant way in which audiences consume film is not in the cinema, but in the domestic environment.”[x] Post-COVID, our students are now more significantly split across those wanting to return to the shared, theatrical big-screen experience, and those who appreciate the convenience and affordances of streaming at home.
Murnau’s Sunrise was a case in point, eliciting applause in the theatre, yet prompting disagreement in the classroom discussion. Many of my students who streamed at home expressed their difficulties connecting to the film, and their surprise that it had prompted applause at the screening. Aesthetic, narrative and ideological considerations emerged in conversation, but also the difference in viewing conditions. As Kannas, Douglas and Thompson’s research suggests, this kind of noticeable split in engagement levels between theatre and streaming will not necessarily always be the case.
More broadly, once audiences have options available to them, they will seek different experiences with different expectations when they choose how to watch a film.[xi] Where, how, and with whom we watch a film has always impacted the film experience, but I would suggest that our pre-, during- and post-COVID experiences, in the classroom and beyond, has made us particularly aware of these film reception dynamics.
[i] Renju Jose, 2021, “Melbourne readies to exit world’s longest COVID-19 lockdown,” Reuters, 21 October, https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/melbourne-readies-exit-worlds-longest-covid-19-lockdowns-2021-10-20/
[ii] Roger Ebert, 2004, “Sunrise,” 11 April, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-sunrise-1928
[iii] F. W. Murnau, quoted in Jonathan Rosenbaum, 2004, “The stuff of dreams,” The Guardian, 1 February, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2004/jan/31/1
[iv] Jacob Agius, 2022, “Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (F.W. Murnau, 1927),” Senses of Cinema, Issue 103, https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2022/cteq/sunrise-a-song-of-two-humans-f-w-murnau-1927/
[v] BFI, 2022, “The Greatest Films of All Time,” https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/greatest-films-all-time
[vi] Robin Boyd, quoted in Lisa French, 2017, “Melbourne’s Capitol Theatre: ‘The Best Cinema That Has Ever Been Built or Is Ever Likely to Be Built,” Senses of Cinema, Issue 85, https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2017/screening-melbourne/melbournes-capitol-theatre/#fn-32032-2
[vii] Wheeler Winston Dixon, 2020, “Film in Lockdown,” Senses of Cinema, Issue 95, https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2020/cinema-in-the-age-of-covid/film-in-lockdown/
[viii] Alexia Kannas, James Douglas, and James Thompson, 2023, “Gazing or glancing? Mapping student engagement when film studies move online,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 53-54, DOI: 10.1177/13548565221148102
[ix] Kannas, Douglas and Thompson, 2023, pp. 53-54.
[x] Brett Mills, 2015, “Should film studies be a sub-discipline of television studies?” CSTOnline, 13 February, https://cstonline.net/should-film-studies-be-a-sub-discipline-of-television-studies-by-brett-mills/
[xi] Matthew Hanchard, Peter Merrington, and Bridgette Wessels, 2020, “Being part of an audience: Patterns of contemporary film audience experience,” Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, vol. 17, issue 2, p. 129, https://www.participations.org/volume-17-issue-2/
Australian Reception Network 