Has the cinephile become extinct? How has Gen Z’s relationship with movies evolved over time? Is artificial intelligence slop truly the future of media? Attendees of “In the Half Light” grappled with these questions and more. The short film showcase, which took place on May 7 outside of the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA), was curated by students in Associate Professor of Art Cecilia Aldarondo’s course, “Cinephilia: Reclaiming Collective Spectatorship in the (In)Attention Era.”
The showcase, intended as an exploration of how film fosters community, screened five movies spanning a century — from a 1924 silent comedy, Sherlock Jr., to Death of a Fantastic Machine, a 2025 short film from The New York Times. The organizers provided snacks and welcomed blankets at the outdoor showcase, hoping to encourage students to strike up conversation with those sitting around them, according to their programming pamphlet.
For Myla Dougherty ’26, a student in the class, the event aimed to create a space for students to critically engage with films while rediscovering the joy of watching movies together. “We hope that people come away from this with a desire to watch movies with other people, to reinvest in these kinds of spaces … and think more critically about the landscape of cinema,” she said in an interview with the Record.
The class collectively decided which movies to showcase. Each student developed an independent programming proposal for the showcase, then the class voted for their favorite choices. Following the vote, Aldarondo divided students into different subcommittees, including programming, logistics, and marketing. The programming subcommittee, composed of Dougherty, Alyza Mendoza ’28, Catherine Shutt ’26.5, and Nahier Tafere ’26.5, developed the final program.
Aldarondo emphasized the importance of students taking charge of the showcase. “What are [students] all doing to come together?” she asked. “You are the ones who are going to be the people inheriting this legacy [of cinema] … so, I’m more interested in listening to what you all want to do together.”
According to Tafere, the movies were chosen to represent, among other issues, both the technical aspects of filmmaking and how the audience relates to movies today. “I’m thinking of Myla’s pick, First Feature, based in Saudi Arabia,” she said. “You see the technical processes, while something is in production … and then other films that are kind of like parodies. My selection [the 1982 short film] Illusions, is kind of parodying Hollywood and its inclusion of African Americans and women.”
The showcase hoped to encourage its audience to consume media intentionally. Enjoy Your Intermission, a portrait documentary about a drive-in movie theatre in upstate New York, showcases how the community’s intentional choice to watch movies at the theater has kept it alive for more than 50 years.
For Dougherty, in an era of streaming services and algorithms, it is important that audiences deliberately choose what movies to watch. “I think a lot of these films look behind, in a sense of who gets to tell us what stories, and how can we, as audiences, not just consume what is presented to us by Netflix playing something automatically next, but [by] making real choices about what we watch and how we watch it,” she said.
According to Aldarondo, another shift in the film-viewing routines of audiences has come from the rise of social media and AI. Shortened attention spans also mean that the audience’s engagement with theatre as a social space has evolved, and that there is a need to re-center the intimacy of cinema, she said.
To address this issue, the class decided to screen Death of a Fantastic Machine, which examines how the audience’s relationship to cameras and media has evolved over time into the current age of smartphones, according to Tafere. “Death of a Fantastic Machine really addresses all the ways that our attention spans are invaded that make feature-length-movie-watching such a disturbance to us,” she said.
For the organizers, the biggest source of anxiety was whether students at the College had enough time to carve out an evening for a short film showcase, but Dougherty emphasized that the class organized it regardless, convinced that it was necessary to reinvigorate communal viewing spaces.
“It can be hard to get people to come,” she said. “There’s such a tough time-scarcity mindset at Williams. But I think it is a really special and important thing to do, and I hope that there is more of that.”
