Scott MacDonald has spent decades at the intersection of cinema and the classroom, championing the avant-garde not merely as a genre but as a rigorous cognitive exercise. In a recent interview with Film Comment, the experimental film scholar reflects on the evolving nature of film pedagogy and the specific demands of introducing undergraduate students to the fringes of the moving image. His remarks arrive at a moment when the institutional place of cinema studies — particularly its more challenging corners — faces quiet but persistent pressure from shifting attention economies and curricular priorities.
MacDonald's body of work, including his long-running "A Critical Cinema" interview series, has positioned him as one of the foremost documentarians of the American avant-garde tradition. His interlocutors over the years have ranged across the spectrum of experimental practice, from structural filmmakers to eco-cinema practitioners. The new conversation extends that project into the territory of teaching itself: how does one transmit an appreciation for difficulty when the surrounding culture increasingly rewards speed and legibility?
Curation as Pedagogy
Central to MacDonald's approach is the collaborative act of programming. By involving students in the selection of film series, he shifts the dynamic from passive consumption to active curation. This method forces a confrontation with foundational films — works that might feel alien to a modern audience but remain essential for understanding the structural grammar of visual storytelling.
The strategy carries an implicit argument about how knowledge of cinema is best acquired. Rather than presenting a fixed canon delivered from the lectern, MacDonald's model treats the syllabus as a negotiated space. Students must research, advocate for, and defend their choices, a process that mirrors the critical thinking the films themselves are meant to provoke. The approach has historical resonance: film societies and cine-clubs in postwar Europe operated on a similar principle, treating programming as a form of collective education rather than entertainment logistics. Amos Vogel's Cinema 16 in New York, which ran from the late 1940s through the early 1960s, demonstrated that the act of assembling a screening program could itself constitute a critical argument about what cinema is and what it could become.
By placing curatorial responsibility in students' hands, MacDonald also sidesteps a common failure mode of arts education — the reduction of challenging work to a list of titles to be dutifully consumed and forgotten. When students have a stake in the selection, the screening becomes an event with consequences rather than an assignment.
Attention as Discipline
To "comprehend" cinema, in MacDonald's framing, is to move beyond the surface of narrative into a deeper awareness of the medium's mechanics. It requires an analytical patience that resists the rapid-fire pacing of contemporary digital media. By stripping away the traditional scaffolds of plot and character, experimental film demands a heightened level of attention, turning the act of watching into a form of intellectual labor.
This insistence on sustained attention places MacDonald's pedagogy in tension with broader trends in media consumption. The average duration of engagement with digital video content has compressed steadily over the past decade, shaped by platforms designed to optimize for retention through brevity and stimulus. Experimental film, by contrast, often operates through duration, repetition, and the deliberate frustration of expectation — techniques that can feel adversarial to viewers trained on algorithmic feeds.
Yet that friction may be precisely the point. The pedagogical value of avant-garde cinema lies not in converting students into devotees of structural film, but in developing a capacity for perceptual discipline that transfers across media. Learning to watch a Stan Brakhage film or a Michael Snow durational piece cultivates a mode of attention that is increasingly rare and, arguably, increasingly valuable — the ability to sit with ambiguity, to resist premature interpretation, and to attend to form as a carrier of meaning independent of content.
The question MacDonald's work raises, without resolving, is whether this kind of training can scale beyond the seminar room. Experimental film has always occupied a marginal position within cinema culture, sustained by a small network of archives, festivals, and university departments. As those institutions face resource constraints and enrollment shifts, the infrastructure that supports this mode of teaching grows thinner. At the same time, the cognitive habits MacDonald seeks to cultivate — close observation, tolerance for difficulty, resistance to distraction — have never been more countercultural, which may be another way of saying they have never been more necessary.
With reporting from Film Comment.
Source · Film Comment
