Comment by WCSTombs
11 hours ago
> 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.