The Film Experience A Course in Transition
DAVID THORBURN: The film experience is, as I said, began many years ago, 38 or 39 years ago in the version that I teach. And it has undergone almost a continuous process of transformation. One of the ironies is that it began its career in an era before there was any technology available to support film study. It made things actually very awkward. But it was also in some way convenient for the professor. What we used to have to do was show the film. We used to-- and in fact, MIT belong to a group called the University Film Study Center. A group of institutions, included Harvard and Yale. And what we did was we had a library of 16 millimeter prints of classic films. And we circulated them. So you had to alter your syllabus so that the guy at Harvard was also able to do Keaton because there was only one copy of The General available. So that was very complicated. And but we all managed to do it. And then at while I was at MIT, that system became moribund because videotape be...