How does a residential college campus like Wellesley participate in and partake of theatrical and non-theatrical film distribution, public and private media consumption? What viewing practices and behaviors are prevalent at Wellesley, and how do they shape the individual and collective identities of its students?

Equally public and private, self-enclosed and widely connected, a college campus is a social space of technologically-mediated interaction and experimentation. Students in the CAMS 225 course provide original insights into the multiple facets of media circulation and consumption at Wellesley. Their contributions bring to light diverse forms of media engagement, from fan cultures to activist media production, from 35mm film screenings to YouTube streaming, defining Wellesley as a particular socially and technologically connected environment.

Informed by archival research, empirical analysis, and critical engagement with theories of the public sphere, these contributions are invitations to discover and engage with the media culture at Wellesley. Grouped in roughly two categories – historical perspective and survey-based analysis – they engage with topics as diverse as:

 

 

 

 

 

 

An anecdote. In March 2021 I received an unusual email from a Wellesley alum, Linda Trowbridge Carleton ‘69:

“In the fall or winter of 1966-67 I saw a film at Wellesley that had a profound impact on me at the time. It might have been shown by the film department or the French department or someone else entirely. I’ve since tried various avenues of identifying the film to no avail. Here’s what I remember- knowing full well that my memory gets pretty faulty these days. It was in black and white, subtitled and I think in French but I’m not positive. It took place in a woods or a park. There was a little lost girl and an old man who befriended her (not sure whether motives were exploitive or not). He became her source of support and in the end her identity. I’m writing a memoir that would be enormously helped along by being able to see this film again or even just being able to identify it.”

As I put my film historian detective skills to use and found the answer to Linda’s query, – Sundays and Cybèle (Serge Bourguignon, 1962, France), Academy Award winner for the best foreign film – I started to think about the larger history of screening, streaming and viewing practices on the Wellesley campus. This website is the result of such an initiative, in the form of the collective labor of the Spring 2022 students in CAMS 225 “From the Fairground to Netflix: Cinema in the Public Sphere.”

— Codruţa Morari, course instructor

The instructor and the students are grateful for the support and collaboration of: Allegra Dufresne (Instructional Technology Specialist), Jarlath Waldron (Instructional Media Director), Wellesley Archives, and the Wellesley students who kindly participated in the surveys.