After he watched a double bill of Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” and “The Virgin Spring” at 11 years old, Leland Poague realized films could be serious. Poague, an English professor of 28 years, says he realized very early he had a serious infatuation with film. He says these movies were a far cry from anything Hollywood, and he has been interested in how each film has affected the way people have viewed film ever since.

Could you tell me about some of the film classes you’re teaching this semester?

Survey of Film History — that’s sort of your big book course. The book probably mentions 1,000 films and I get to show maybe 14 feature length movies and clips from others. Really early films were 10, 30 or 50 seconds, so if you count every film like that I show, a couple hundred maybe.

The hope there is to give students a large scale framework so they have a sense that Ozu was a Japanese director and Bresson was a French director, and that they were working roughly at the same time. I’m using examples here that are not exactly familiar. You have to keep bouncing back between the big picture and particular films. For me, as well as I think most of my students, the fun is the movies.

There is also a junior/senior level rolling topics course, and next semester I plan to cover Alfred Hitchcock. All of the classes involve seeing the films together; that’s a really crucial element, I think. I don’t think it’s the case that television means that everyone watches film solitary. I think a lot of people watch television together.

I still think enough of film history is predicated on the fact that large numbers of people would sit in the same room and watch the same movie; it’s really important to see a film with an audience.

Do you think there’s a big difference between television and movies?

Obviously certain kinds of films, like art films, will make more demands on the viewer than the stuff you see on television. Of course, it also depends on what television channel. You could turn that contraption on and start surfing and bam — all of a sudden you’re on an independent film channel or the Sundance Festival movie channel. You could be watching something that will be intellectually demanding.

How do you, if you do, think movies affect popular culture?

A movie that a lot of people saw has greater potential to affect culture than one very few people see. But there again, it’s completely unpredictable. Once you sort of get past the ‘how many people saw it’ question, then another question is how do you judge its effect and you know, this being a human institution, that’s difficult to do.

You can’t say for example, ‘oh, most of the people walk around being heterosexual because they watch a bunch of Julia Roberts movies.’ What are you going to do? Pull all the Julia Roberts movies out and see if things get more interesting. You’re not in the position to test the proposition, but it doesn’t mean you can’t think about it.

It’s this sort of long-standing argument that Hollywood tends to involve stereotypes to the extent that people live their lives by means of acting on those stereotypes. It becomes the chicken and the egg. Are American films racist because Americans are racist or are Americans racist because American films are racist?

I guess you could say Americans happened before American films. There’s a kind of progressive history in American films in that a lot of the energy for the civil rights movement in the ’40s and ’50s came out of Hollywood. There was an obligation and desire to discuss racism in its various films.

Is there one specific movie that you think has had an impact on films in general?

Any time you talk about film in general you are talking about trends. A fairly obvious trend is the computer graphics. ‘The Lord of the Rings’ trilogy is unimaginable without massive employment of computer graphics. You can go back to ‘The Matrix’ or ‘The Terminator’ films which also make use of that kind of technology.

What is your favorite movie, and actor or actress?

I see so many movies that it’s hard for me to pick out. If you asked me my favorite actress it probably has to be Barbara Stanwyck because she was sort of a weird host of really crucial ’30s and ’40s movies. Her career went far past that though. She was in ‘Stella Dallas,’ ‘The Lady Eve,’ and she was in a whole bunch of early Capra films.

I would have no trouble saying that a favorite actor is Cary Grant. He has a long track record with a lot of different kinds of films, though I suppose the most classic Cary Grant film is Hitchcock’s ‘North by Northwest,’ which holds up pretty good every time I see it.

What do you especially like or dislike about teaching film?

The best part is that there are so many great movies to see and think about. And that’s the worst part, too.