Comment by prhn
10 hours ago
I don't dispute the shortening of attentions spans, which seems to be directly related to new forms of entertainment young people consume.
However. Films across the generations are very different in terms of how they lay out a narrative. Watch any film before 1980 and you'll start to see a pattern that the pacing and evolution of the narrative is generally very, very slow.
Art is highly contextualized by the period it's created in. I don't really think it's fair to expect people to appreciate art when it's taken completely out of its context.
Lawrence of Arabia, for example. What a brilliant, brilliant film. Beautiful, influential, impressively produced. And really, really boring and slow a lot of the time.
If I were a film professor today, hell even 20 years ago, I would not expect a modern film student to sit through that whole thing. I think it's my job as a professor to understand the context of the period, highlight the influential/important scenes, and get students to focus on those instead of having to watch 4 hours of slowly paced film making and possibly miss the important stuff.
> If I were a film professor today, hell even 20 years ago, I would not expect a modern film student to sit through that whole thing.
Our local cinematheque has just had a 70mm festival, where they of course screened Lawrence of Arabia. All screenings were sold out. My mom went to see another screening at the same time, and commented on how many young people were going to see Lawrence. The past couple of years there has been a strong uptick[1] here of younger people flocking to see older films.
[1]: https://www.nrk.no/kultur/analog-film-trender-blant-unge-1.1...
The pacing is irrelevant in this context. As a student the main point of watching these movies is not entertainment.
Although I will say it's pretty amazing that someone that supposedly has an interest in film would not be able to watch The Conversation or an even slower film like 2001.
> And really, really boring and slow a lot of the time
If you only watch the story-driven scenes in Lawrence of Arabia, and skip the prolonged shots of the desert, you would miss out feeling the same vastness and heat Lawrence is feeling.
There is a limit to how much a film can make you think or feel. Films that reach the highest limits need "boring" voids in-between the primary scenes. These voids are not to ingest more, but to help digest what has been ingested in previous scenes, with subliminal scenes and silence that let the right thoughts and feelings grow.
> And really, really boring and slow a lot of the time.
It's not boring on a giant display with the original 6-track mix playing just a tad too loud all around you. I've seen it in 70mm at the AFI in Silver Spring, MD; candy for the eyes and ears.
It would likely be boring if played at a quiet volume on a small display. This is because movies are, in part, spectacle. Cirque du Soleil would likely be boring too if viewed very, very far away.
>And really, really boring and slow a lot of the time.
At no point was it "boring"
I guess that might be a modern interpretation. But I do disagree as well. I actually prefer older films because of the pacing, and fortunately live close enough to the TIFF cinema that I can see such films every other week.
In fairness, Lawrence's own book on which the movie is based, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, is a disjointed, rambling, and usually boring book. The high points are really good, but you slog through a lot to get there.
> Watch any film before 1980 and you'll start to see a pattern that the pacing and evolution of the narrative is generally very, very slow.
Star Wars, Enter the Dragon, Game of Death, Mad Max, and many Bond films are fun counterexamples.
> If I were a film professor today, hell even 20 years ago, I would not expect a modern film student to sit through that whole thing.
Sorry, but this to me sounds completely insane. We're not even talking about the general population here, but people who are ostensibly serious about the art and craft of film making. And the bar is being set at literally just watching the movie, and not even some obscure marathon of a film that takes a degree to be appreciated, but a major mass-released picture that has already been enjoyed by countless people.
What seems to be missing for me at least is that I doubt I would have done well being assigned entire films on top of my regular course load worth of studies.
Paying attention to a film enough to emotionally connect with the content, take notes, synthesize an academic understanding of subtle things like the use of lighting, sound, camera work, etc while also doing the other several hours worth of homework from my other classes would be pretty daunting.
Much easier to get the clif notes from the Internet and fake it... though I had CS, math and Mandarin courses which were way way heavier on the homework side of things than most other classes I took, so maybe I'm overthinking it.
I like a lot of long films, but at nearly 4 hours, Lawrence of Arabia is a marathon of a film. I've not seen it, I did order a copy recently, but it was cancelled; and I missed the Fathom screening for some reason or another, but I'll see it eventually; I like long movies and movies involving sand, so it seems like an easy win.
I would think a film studies class might not want to spend so much time on a single film, so maybe several scenes would be more appropriate.
I imagine a film student watching the baptism scene of Michael Corleone and thinking it is boring.
We're not talking about random people pulled off the street and asked to watch Lawrence of Arabia. We're talking about film students. So I don't see how your post is relevant at all. It's like excusing poor literature students because your brother in law struggled with Moby Dick.
No you're wrong. It's not about the era. Matt Damon talked about this on the Joe Rogan podcast recently. He was asked by Netflix to create a big action sequence in the first 5 mins so that people on their phones would get hooked into watching the entire movie. He was also asked to mention the plot of the movie several times throughout the movie because people on their phones will tend to miss plot details and it helped keep them engaged.
This is not about how movies are paced, it's about the way phones have changed attention spans.
I think part of the problem too is there being so much slop content now that isn't worth paying 100% to which primes people to use their phone while watching for example netflix. And there is no differentiation between "higher quality pay attention to me content" that loses value by not paying attention and "quick and dirty low budget background movie" that loses value by paying attention to everything outside of a few key moments that covers the basic story line.
No he's right, there is definitely a difference in pacing for films throughout the decades.
Much of the content that Netflix produces however is not made to be shown in a cinema like setting - its something that people put on while doing something else, like TV so whatever Damon was saying on a podcast makes sense in the context, its however not indicative of a whole generation of movies - there are still plenty of films being made that require full attention for an extended period of time, many of which are also on Netflix. One could argue that there was never a time in history where more excellent, deep and complex content was being made.
One other part is also that traditional TV (which arguably also never required full attention) has been replaced by new mediums. Personally I never owned a TV in my life.
The whole argument "phone bad" is a bit lazy IMO and doesn't at all take in account the nuance that would be required for a serious discussion.
There is different pacing throughout film history but that's not what the original article is about. The original article is talking about how film students can't sit through movies and that's because of attention spans and phones.
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