Film students who can no longer sit through films • Hacker News Board

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#111

Post by rishabhaiover » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 8:17 PM UTC

semilin wrote: post #35

If you really care about something, screen addiction does not interfere. A friend of mine has a terrible Instagram addiction, yet has developed for himself a certain degree of cinephilia lately -- we've watched long movies together in theaters and not once has he been on his phone during the screenings. When one has faith that sustained attention might hold more value than that gained by interruption, they tend to pr…

> When one has faith that sustained attention might hold more value than that gained by interruption, they tend to prioritize the former.

I suspect that attention is naturally tuned to work towards genuine interests which may be orthogonal to conventional value producing tasks

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#112

Post by pier25 » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 8:26 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #33

Counterpoint from the article: > A handful of professors told me they hadn’t noticed any change. Some students have always found old movies to be slow, Lynn Spigel, a professor of screen cultures at Northwestern University, told me. “But the ones who are really dedicated to learning film always were into it, and they still are.” The article doesn't actually give any evidence attention spans are shortened. Many of the…

> It's not that I suffer from a short attention span, it's that there's nothing to pay attention to.

There is definitely something. Nothing to pay attention to would be a silent black screen.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#113

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 8:28 PM UTC

Der_Einzige wrote: post #94

philipallstar wrote: post #10

> Smith has administered similar exams for almost two decades; he had to grade his most recent exam on a curve to keep students’ marks within a normal range. This is really silly. Just fail them. They are not customers.

Teachers/Professors are some of the biggest oppressors in society. They directly decide who gets to be poor and who gets to be wealthy. Every negative grade they give is robbery of food out of your children's mouth. There's a reason they get their backs against the walls first during revolutions. The book that coined the term "Meritocracy" was extremely critical of the concept for a reason. It is bad to try to have o…

[deleted]

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#114

Post by wincy » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 8:28 PM UTC

b112 wrote: post #109

nephihaha wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Game of Thrones" was interesting because it did not follow any formula I could discern" Introduction of character. Dialogue. Gratuitous sex scene. Machiavellian discussion. Reference to earlier episode. Cliffhanger.

Yes, it's dasterdly! Almost every movie has a plot. How formulaic. How droll! I find these sorts of discussions to be strange. Yes, stories follow specific methods to convey them. Yes, conflict is part of that. I will agree that too formulaic is a sign of the times. I find that many 60s and 70s movies were the most creative this way. The 30s often had movies that were just plays on film. The 50s were where the proces…

I only watch movies that are a series of randomly seeded intervals of tones at various pitches, random colors, with static added in. This ensures I never watch anything formulaic or predictable.

More seriously, it is interesting when a movie breaks out of a formula, especially in well established tropes, like Disney movies. Moana or Encanto come to mind as they convey stories where there either isn’t really a villain (spoilers, Te’Ka is not the villain), and especially in Encanto the conflict is more internal family issues than anything else.

But sometimes it feels good to just watch those archetypal stories. I know people hate on Marvel but the Thanos arc with the infinity stones and the snap was such a fun ride, over the course of many years. These stories are extremely formulaic but still enjoyable because on some level we are wired to enjoy these stories.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#115

Post by jamestimmins » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 8:28 PM UTC

Jonathan Haidt recently made the point on Ezra Klein's podcast that while adults can take a break from phones and reset their attention/hormones in a couple of weeks, we don't know what impact similar addiction has on a developing mind. It's possible the addiction sets in much deeper.

I'm sympathetic to folks who grew up shaped by this. Not for nothing, but The Conversation also has a compelling start/end, but has a long, arguably slow, boring middle. So it's like being forced into withdrawal on hard mode.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#116

Post by wizardforhire » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 8:31 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #33

Counterpoint from the article: > A handful of professors told me they hadn’t noticed any change. Some students have always found old movies to be slow, Lynn Spigel, a professor of screen cultures at Northwestern University, told me. “But the ones who are really dedicated to learning film always were into it, and they still are.” The article doesn't actually give any evidence attention spans are shortened. Many of the…

>Many of the movies you study in film school are genuinely excruciatingly slow and boring…

Case in point [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_(1965_film)

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#117

Post by deadbabe » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 8:32 PM UTC

semilin wrote: post #35

If you really care about something, screen addiction does not interfere. A friend of mine has a terrible Instagram addiction, yet has developed for himself a certain degree of cinephilia lately -- we've watched long movies together in theaters and not once has he been on his phone during the screenings. When one has faith that sustained attention might hold more value than that gained by interruption, they tend to pr…

These “film students” are like the people who take computer science just because they like playing video games.

Most of their idea of film is putting together little reels and TikToks. “Absolute Cinema” type stuff. They don’t actually care about movies and the art.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#118

Post by pier25 » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 8:32 PM UTC

rwc wrote: post #14

"Many students are resisting the idea of in-person screenings altogether. Given the ease of streaming assignments from their dorm rooms, they see gathering in a campus theater as an imposition." Students telegraphing to the film world that a coming generation of consumers simply won't be going to the theatre. The article is framed as a tragedy about the students, but it's actually a tragedy about the professors and i…

I love movies but in the last 5-6 years I've only been 3 times to the theater. Dune 1, Dune 2, and Oppenheimer.

Theaters in my area couldn't care less about image and sound quality. Audiences don't seem to care at all about movies. Most are either on their phones or talking.

I'm not paying exorbitant prices for such sub par experience. I'd rather watch the movie at home with 4K DV on an OLED display and an Atmos setup.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#119

Post by prhn » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 8:34 PM UTC

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.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#120

Post by pier25 » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 8:35 PM UTC

treelover wrote: post #20

Is it a loss of attention span, or is the 2-hour feature film simply an outdated format for the current generation? The information density of a slow 1970s drama is incredibly low compared to the multi-stream environment they grew up in. They aren't necessarily 'dumber'; their brains are just optimized for high-frequency information processing, whereas cinema is optimized for immersion.

That's a way of saying that they need constant stimulation which is exactly an inability to focus or a loss of attention span.