He is simply referring to the tendency in student films to shy away from choosing a character's perspective in a dialogue scene, resorting to the laziest option available-just filming one person flatly facing another-instead of blocking the actors and composing the scene in an interesting way that tells the story more dramatically.ДЄs with all of his advice, he is just trying to get us to think about how best to tell the story. I'm pretty sure your professor was also my professor.

Sometimes you want that sort of tableau composition to create a sense of space around the characters, or in being formal and austere, to suggest an environment that has entrapped the characters. Or look at the movies of Ozu or Tarkovsky. 'The Godfather' for example is more a story about a family than it is just Michael's story and the camera tends to take a more objective, proscenium style approach rather than the subjective 'character looks, we see what he sees, we cut back to his reaction' sort of style. because even though that approach is very effective in drawing a viewer into the narrative, it does have the disadvantage of making it harder to step back and see the story from a 'colder' more objective perspective, which is useful when dealing with, let's say, political or social issues on a larger scale, or when telling stories about a particular group rather than an individual.

which is great but not all movies have to be subjective, emotional experiences where the camera takes the point of view of the main character. Your professor is talking in particular about subjective filmmaking in the mode of Hitchcock, Polanski, etc. Here's a silhouette profile shot that from a character's perspective.

Shot designer add more shots