Gazing or glancing? Mapping student engagement when film studies moves online

This article presents the findings of a study undertaken by a team of three film studies teacher-researchers working with undergraduate students in a course titled ‘Histories of Film Theory’. In the context of the transition from face-to-face to remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors observed that students’ approaches to understanding relevant film theories became increasingly inflected by their experiences of contrasting methods of course delivery, such as that between the cinema theatre or home viewing environment. To investigate this effect, the authors conducted a study of student experience across the 2020 and 2021 cohorts; the purpose was to understand how the shift to online learning shaped students’ engagement with set film texts, by analysing the behaviour exhibited when accessing film texts remotely. The study is grounded in the observation that there is an existing body of film theory on screen spectatorship that has potential significance to a scholarly understanding of the pedagogical complexity of online learning and multimodal literacies. This scholarship ranges from analyses of ‘traditional’ reception environments (Baudry 1974), to accounts of the differentiation in modes of attention introduced by new media (Ellis 1992, Cavell 1982), to analyses of the multiplying second screen practices of the digital era (Casetti 2011). A governing distinction highlighted in the results is between ‘gazing’, the mode of spectatorship associated with the traditional cinema experience, and ‘glancing’, the mode associated with home viewing and second screen use. Were the students in the course gazing or glancing, and how did this affect their encounters with films and characterize their remote learning experience more broadly? In asking these questions, the article demonstrates how the intellectual resources of film studies might be applied to contemporary digital pedagogy scholarship to reveal a complex scenario in which remote learning practices both hinder and enhance learning experiences, sometimes simultaneously.