As it has often been said, movies teach you how to watch them. This pedagogy can take on almost Pavlovian forms as in the case of horror movies such as Jaws, which teaches you to treat a few notes on a tuba as terrifying. However, every film instructs you how to view it, and a lot of the struggle with watching different kinds of films has to with learning how to see things differently. If you come to a Béla Tarr film with John Woo habits you are going to be bored. Our viewing habits make our viewing practices. A lot of our debates about attention are about this process of learning, of how we have had our capacity for attention reduced. Netflix films made to be watched while doing laundry or scrolling on our phone prepare us to watch other films the same way, and when they cannot be viewed that way we get confused. Every film teaches you how to watch it, but only one film I can think of tells you where you should watch it and that film is The Last Dragon, or, as we are supposed to call Berry Gordy's The Last Dragon.
