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

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#131

Post by wat10000 » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 8:51 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…

You might be extremely interested in a field and yet not find every part of it to be so interesting. Certainly not everything I studied in my computer science degrees was something I cared about deeply. I've never studied film, but I'd wager there are a number of films that are educationally significant to watch but that aren't very entertaining.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#132

Post by crazygringo » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 8:53 PM UTC

bccdee wrote: post #124

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…

> I love movies. But I also make liberal use of 2x speed and +5s during interminably long suspense sequences that are literally just someone walking through a dark environment while spooky music plays. It's not that I suffer from a short attention span No, I'm sorry, I do think this is an attention span issue. You say there's no virtue in suffering through boredom, but a few minutes of scene-setting should not feel p…

Your analysis is extremely simplistic.

> Yes, some movies are boring, but those are bad movies.

Actually, in real life, otherwise good movies can have some less-good parts, and otherwise bad movies can have some individual scenes that are great. Life, and art, isn't black-and-white.

> If the middle isn't enjoyable, the end probably won't be either

You've clearly never taken taken a screenwriting course, or analyzed the many many movies with a saggy middle but a great ending -- which is actually an extremely common pattern. There's even a name for it, the "second-act slump".

> but it doesn't need to be painful to sit & do nothing for a bit. Once you get used to it, it stops feeling so uncomfortable.

Nobody ever said anything about it being painful or uncomfortable. It's just making better use of your time.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#133

Post by rabf » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 8:54 PM UTC

Gimpei wrote: post #51

I took a bunch of film classes in college and what they’re not mentioning is that sometimes the films bring assigned are crazy boring. I once had to watch an hour of footage shot from a camera in an outdoor elevator as it went up and down. One hour. The professor said it was the perfect summation of everything he’d been discussing over the term. I swear I’m not joking.

Perhaps as a film student you were meant to be looking at the composition, the shot structures, the color grading, the use of sound? The film may have been boring in its message or story but still a technical masterpiece?

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#134

Post by lalalandland » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 8:54 PM UTC

vitaelabitur wrote: post #63

We traded books for films, and now films for short videos, always moving towards what is easier to enjoy. Quite a while ago, books became a taste that needs to be patiently acquired. Someone starting to read today is more likely to develop the taste by gradually easing into books that demand more and more. Say maybe Huxley -> Camus -> Wilde -> Dostoevsky. Now that short clips are here, the same has happened to films.…

I think TV series are bigger than films now. They have established characters and story line spanned over several shorter episodes with cliffhangers and recaps etc. Once you get into a series you follow it for several seasons. It's a preferred way to tell stories.

I usually prefer films over TV series because I find just these tropes tiring. I find TV series have quite inefficient story telling and spend most of its time trying to get me hooked to watch the next episode.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#135

Post by viccis » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 8:56 PM UTC

prhn wrote: post #119

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 i…

>And really, really boring and slow a lot of the time.

At no point was it "boring"

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#136

Post by rabf » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 8:56 PM UTC

recursivedoubts wrote: post #4

OK, phones & social media are obviously dangerously addictive. Now what?

Install Davinci Resolve on your phone.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#137

Post by bccdee » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 8:57 PM UTC

mym1990 wrote: post #19

tartoran wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get off them. Many started to already.

About as useful as telling a heroine addict to get off heroine, except that screen addiction is much more subtle in the harmful effects, but is incredibly corrosive over time. Almost all tech products in the world are pushing for more and more screentime, there is really not much regulation in sight, in the US at least(go Australia!). The best hope is that one day an Ozempic for screen time comes out!

Screen "addiction" isn't a real thing. Addiction is a specific medical phenomenon, not just any bad habit. Go find me a study in a medical journal that quantifies the physiological effects of smartphone withdrawal.

I do think people spend too much time on social media, but it's not helpful to frame this by analogy to something it simply is not. Bad habits are bad in their own right. We don't need to appropriate medical language to discuss them, and doing so is misleading. You can actually just stop using Instagram Reels. It's nothing like heroin. It's a bad habit, and you can just turn it off.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#138

Post by Insanity » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 8:58 PM UTC

viccis wrote: post #135

prhn wrote: post #119

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 i…

>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.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#139

Post by bccdee » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 8:59 PM UTC

Der_Einzige wrote: post #40

How do I sqaure this circle with that the biggest films in the last two decades have been Avatar, Avatar: The Way of Water, and Avatar: Fire and Ash 2h 42m, 3 hours 12 minutes, and 3 hours 15 minutes. All 3 are WAY too long and Way of Water in particular felt like it was 4+ hours subjectively. Yet, they're literally the biggest films EVER by gross. So seems the general public has longer attention spans than film stud…

These are Hollywood blockbusters, not art films. You can keep a baby entertained for hours with CoComelon, but that doesn't mean they could get through Moby Dick.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#140

Post by crazygringo » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 8:59 PM UTC

SiempreViernes wrote: post #102

crazygringo wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody watches the same movie, the same way no man steps into the same river twice. Some people have trouble following plot. Some people excuse themselves to use the bathroom. Some people have trouble catching all the dialog. Some people close their eyes during the scary parts. Different elements call up totally different associations in different people's brains. If you watch a movie a first time and then a second t…

But what you are doing isn't the same river twice, it's saying "it works on my machine" but not saying you patched the binary.

Movies aren't consumed as bit-perfect binaries to begin with. They're distributed as files that way, maybe, but even the basic viewing and sound conditions are different for everyone. Color fidelity, detail, acoustic muddiness due to room reverb. Literally everyone's watching a "differently patched binary" if that's how you want to think of it.