Love It, Loathe It: My (Problematic) Relationship with YouTube

Week four of my Cinema History course is usually devoted to silent Soviet cinema. Like most film professors (I assume), I lecture on the Russian Revolution, Émigrés, montage, the Kuleshov Effect, cine-truth, and typage. Then, my students and I screen Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925). After the film, we discuss the concept of intellectual montage via Eisenstein’s “waking lion” (right), three separate images that symbolize the Russian people rising against Czarist rule. We also talk about the film’s opening, which depicts the ill-treatment of sailors by juxtaposing images of men suspended in hammocks with those of maggots in rancid meat. And of course, we explore the most famous section of Battleship Potemkin, the Odessa Steps sequence. At this point, the students and I leave much of the narrative behind and take into account only the sequence’s discontinuous editing: the director’s chaotic ASLs (average shot length), jump cuts, overlapping edits, lack of establishing shots, etc.

After we conclude our analysis, I usually eject Potemkin from the DVD player and replace it with Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987), a gangster film that nicely pays homage to (or plagiarizes?) a part of Eisenstein’s Odessa sequence. The class and I normally watch the 8-minute scene and then contrast it with Potemkin‘s. Again leaving virtually all plot points at the door, we talk about the (drastic) difference in the classical/invisible editing style of De Palma and disjunctive style of Eisenstein. “Did you notice all of Costner’s POV shots and perfect eyeline matches?” I ask. “At what points were you privy to every character’s location in the scene? Did you see all of those establishing shots of the train station and staircase? Were any shots repeated more than once?” Our discussion of Potemkin vs. Untouchables is virtually always a productive one, which is why I was so disappointed that a few days ago I forgot to slide the gangster movie into my bag. Damn.

What to do? Do I turn to the Internet to get my fix? Yeah, I do. While the students complete their participation exercise, I pull up YouTube. Surely this scene from The Untouchables is on the Internet, I thought desperately. And of course, there it was. In fact, the entire movie is on YouTube, if you’re interested. It turns out that I just needed Part 10 of 12.

The class submitted their quizzes. I played De Palma’s baby carriage clip. We considered the scene’s continuity editing style. We went home. Everything worked out perfectly, just as it does when I pop in the DVD.

For this reason, I love YouTube, Google videos, and the like (Moving Image Archive is particularly handy for early canonical films). After all, they are there when I leave a film at home. They are there when the university library or film department doesn’t own a movie. And they are there for my online film courses into which I frequently embed clips from online videos like Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet. There are times, however, when I loathe YouTube.

Ironically, what bothers me about online videos is also what I love about them: their availability. Because the services are so available (i.e., free), some students will only  experience films like Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Bicycle Thieves, and Double Indemnity in minuscule proportions with shoddy quality and terrible sound. Because of YouTube and Google Videos, they miss out on Curtiz’s memorable soundtrack, Welles’s brilliant deep-focus cinematography, De Sica’s stark setting, and Wilder’s low-key lighting. And this saddens me.

I’m quite aware that the way we screen films/TV is changing (it’s always in flux) and that watching movies on 3″ iPod screens, 10″ portable DVD player screens, and computer monitors is the norm — for some people. For National Treasure, Superbad, and Mamma Mia!, that’s fine. But some films — when screened in their entirety — just deserve better. Don’t they?

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