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Film students who can no longer sit through films

theatlantic.com

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Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#171

Post by rjh29 »

jamestimmins wrote: post #115

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…

I think that's true. Alcohol addiction modifies the brain and it can take over a year to recover dopamine sensitivity, focus, mood, cognitive ability. It's called PAWS (post acute withdrawal syndrome). Given TikTok etc. has a similar profile of long usage over a long period, I'd also expect it to take a long time to fully recover from.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#172

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

blindriver wrote: post #130
socalgal2 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. There are lots of movies that are hard to watch. A modern one for many people is "The Green Knight". I made it to the end but personally the movie didn't do anything for me and I don't agree with the praise. I generally don't skip forward but I did on several parts of Pluribus. There were several segments that were clearly just filler and after the first episode or so where they stuck out it just got tiring.…

> Character: "I'm flying to Vegas", the 3 minutes of pack, get in car, drive car, get to airport, walk through airport That is classic Vince Gilligan. He does that several times in both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. It's not filler, it's done with intentionality. You might not like it, but to say that an editor should cut that out is simply wrong. That's his distinct style, just like Wes Anderson has his own sty…

A couple of years ago, I rewatched some episodes of a 70s BBC drama called "Survivors" (the plot etc. is irrelevant in the current context). In the very first episode there's a scene where a woman who is looking for her son but has no idea where he might be walks across a very small wooden bridge over an even small creek. She stops in the middle, holds the rail on the bridge and looks down at the water. The camera shows us what she sees. For somewhere between 30 and 60 seconds, we just see the water in the creek flowing. It's not even particularly beautiful.

Aesthetics sure can change a lot, even within a single lifetime.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#173

Post by bccdee »

bronlund wrote: post #159
bccdee wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being easily bored is the same thing as having a poor attention span. Of course they have no issue spending time on the things they love. If they struggle to focus on something, they probably will find themselves unable to enjoy it very much. I don't think any of the film students who spend the whole movie on their phones go home afterward to read Moby Dick.

Not too long ago, reading books was also considered evil. It was argued that they were addictive and antisocial. You sound like those people who think Battleship Potemkin is the greatest movie of all time.

> Not too long ago, reading books was also considered evil.

Yeah, well, they were wrong and I'm right.

> You sound like those people who think Battleship Potemkin is the greatest movie of all time.

100% critic & 86% user approval on Rotten Tomatoes, 97/100 on Metacritic. Universally acclaimed, massively influential. Have you considered that Battleship Potemkin might just be a good movie? Have you tried watching it?

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#174

Post by l33tbro »

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.

What's the "information density" of a Matisse ot a Pollock?

There's an enormous thematic subtext of surveillance state and paranoia running in the background of The Conversation that is "informationally dense", but if you've grown up mainlining Coco Melon and Tiktok shorts, that "information" is not available to you because you have poorly developed critical faculties.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#175

Post by blindriver »

acessoproibido wrote: post #146
blindriver wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 help…

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 f…

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.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#176

Post by tayo42 »

steve1977 wrote: post #31
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.

> Is it a loss of attention span, or is the 2-hour feature film simply an outdated format for the current generation? Why would you think it's an outdated format for the current generation if not for their loss of attention span?

TV shows are basically mini movies, multiple episodes allows for much more interesting stories and development

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#178

Post by _m_p »

pier25 wrote: post #123
_m_p wrote: post #104

Art isn't for everybody.

Indeed. But if film is not for you maybe don't study film?

Technically they aren't studying film! The article notes that the professors won't outright fail them, so these students just getting a degree without doing any work. Which in turn makes the degree credential a useless signal.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#180

Post by bccdee »

crazygringo wrote: post #160
bccdee wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A saggy middle is relative. It's one thing for the middle of a movie to be the least compelling part; it's another for the middle to be so dull that you have to skip it entirely. If a movie's longer than 90 minutes, then they had room to cut stuff, and they chose not to. > Your analysis is extremely simplistic. It's extremely general, is what. That's by necessity; we're not talking about any particular movie. Broadly…

> Broadly speaking, if it's worth watching the end of a movie, it's probably worth watching the whole thing. That's what I'm 100% disagreeing with. It might actually be worth fast-forwarding through some dark suspenseful parts with no dialog or meaningful action. > "Suffering through boredom" was how you phrased it. Right. It's boring. Boring isn't pain or discomfort . It's boredom , its own category. Why suffer that…

Suffering is painful and uncomfortable. The pain and discomfort are what make it suffering.

It's not a question of moral virtue. There's no moral virtue in cooking with spices, either. Watching a movie at 2x may make it worse, but it's not immoral.

> That's unhelpful black-and-white thinking.

Unhelpful to what? What's the goal here? Simply getting to the end of the movie? They put middles in movies for a reason—they're a load-bearing part of the experience. Why sit through a warped & incomplete version of a mediocre movie when you could just turn it off & watch the complete version of something consistently good? Of course, if you're fast-forwarding through pieces of everything, this doesn't work, but that's a red flag in and of itself, and it should prompt you to ask yourself why you can't sit through a whole movie. Do they all have unacceptably slow pacing? Or is there a problem with your expectations?

I should point out, also, that I don't mean this in a black-and-white sense. I'm not saying that fast-forwarding through one scene one time is some sort of mark against you. But if you find yourself doing this consistently, how can you be sure that the problem isn't on your end? The point of holding yourself to standards isn't finger-wagging; it's to provide an objective lens to view yourself through. How would you know if you did have a problem with your attention span, if not by monitoring yourself for the coping strategies which a person with a low attention span would use?

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