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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

#191

Post by mym1990 »

bccdee wrote: post #137
mym1990 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 medic…

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12401922/

"In contrast[to drug withdrawal], smartphone dependence is driven by digital stimuli and psychological-behavioral mechanisms, with almost no physical dependence; withdrawal mainly causes psychological discomfort (such as restlessness) without severe physical reactions. Its health risks are mostly indirect (like vision loss, sleep disorders), and withdrawal can generally be improved through behavioral adjustments."

I can find you 10 more but I doubt it would change your outlook.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#192

Post by crazygringo »

bccdee wrote: post #182
technothrasher wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> interminably long suspense sequences that are literally just someone walking through a dark environment while spooky music plays. The few film studies classes I took in high school and college taught me so much about the hows and whys of film, that I can't possibly now watch a sequence like that and think "just someone walking through a dark environment". So much going on in those scenes that you'll miss if you're…

That's why I'm "pro-boredom," in a sense. If you let yourself dismiss a scene when you're not enjoying it, you may never discover what's enjoyable about it. Putting in the work of paying attention pays dividends. Of course, sometimes it yields nothing, but that's why you need to get good at it. If paying attention to something boring feels like pulling teeth, you'll never do it, and you'll miss a lot of great stuff.…

How about all those movies where the critical consensus is that it's overlong and needed to be tightened? That the mediocre 2:10 movie could have made for a great 1:40 movie?

Directors aren't infallible. They frequently make movies that are too long. Making the most of my two hours sometimes requires playing some of the overlong parts at 2x speed, because they often don't pay dividends at all. It has nothing to do with "putting in the work of paying attention", it's just not worth it.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#193

Post by mym1990 »

sho_hn wrote: post #34
mym1990 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

It's a bit more useful, in that the consensus on "phone use bad" is still a lot more shaky than "heroin bad".

Sure, I would agree my comment was hyperbolic. If the consensus on "phone use bad" is still shaky, wouldn't telling someone to get off their phone actually be less useful, because there would be more skepticism over the harm being done?

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#194

Post by CamperBob2 »

nephihaha wrote: post #105
Cpoll wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is information density a meaningful metric for movies? I'm reminded of Kubrick's long pauses, or the space scenes in 2001, which are there to set the tone or give the viewer time to consider the situation, not to deliver information.

Kubrick has nothing on Tarkovsky who has nothing on even more longwinded directors. I love some of Tarkovsky, but some of it is very slow e.g. Nostalgia and Stalker.

I'd like to see some of those ADHD film students sit through The Sacrifice.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#195

Post by tdeck »

dunham wrote: post #164
ksymph wrote: post #27

Why would someone study film if they're not interested in it? People have been bored by movies nearly as long as movies have existed; but historically I don't think those people would go into college to study it. What changed? It's not like there's a lot of money in film, so I struggle to understand the motivations there.

When I was in school a lot of the CS students would take a telecommunications minor because they needed a minor and it was "easy". It included a film class.

I've never heard of needing a minor. Was that a requirement at your school?

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#196

Post by vitaelabitur »

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

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.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#197

Post by [deleted] »

perching_aix wrote: post #126
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…

> But the article points out that the students here don't even watch movies themselves -- "students have struggled to name any film" they recently watched. Why are these people even studying film? The inattention is clearly caused by disinterest. There's a saying around here that roughly goes: few things are as successful in killing one's interest in something as pursuing a formal education about it. Being innately i…

[deleted]

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#198

Post by CamperBob2 »

jeffreygoesto wrote: post #107
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…

Did you do that on the first 45 minutes of 2001? SCNR.

The first time someone encounters 2001, they will almost certainly come away with some WTF? vibes, at least if they're being honest with themselves.

For my first time, I made the mistake of renting a VHS and watching it on a 19" TV. Heard this was a good SF movie, guess I'll check it off my list. Yeah, no. What I saw later in a 70mm cinema was the same content, same story, same words and images, but a very different movie. The setting and presentation made all the difference between a seemingly-pointless waste of time and a profound life experience.

That said, what we saw isn't what Kubrick filmed. Bowman's exercise sequence was originally a full 10 minutes long, just pacing around in circles, and a few other sequences including the Dawn of Man prologue were also much longer. Audiences in 1968 weren't buying it. Kubrick had to tighten things up, because complaining about the audience's attention span wasn't the option back then that it apparently is now.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#199

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

bccdee wrote: post #155
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.…

> I generally don't skip forward but I did on several parts of Pluribus. There were several segments that were clearly just filler When I read the post you're replying to, my first thought was, "sure, some movies are boring. But I bet they're talking about stuff like Pluribus, not actual boring movies." Pluribus has no filler. Sure: the plot moves slowly, the cinematography is artsy and sedate, and it's all very char…

I regret watching that series, it was immensely disappointing. Some aspects are really well executed like the coloring and framing, but that's not enough to carry a series. Pluribus is a concept that works for a single season, anything beyond that is dragging its feet.

Screw off with this "you're holding it wrong" nonsense. Sometimes the work is bad, but it has good components or elements and you can still enjoy those however you want. I stuck with the series because I was hoping there would be some redeeming aspects by the end, but it didn't pay off.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#200

Post by Der_Einzige »

bccdee wrote: post #139
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.

Everyone I know who critiques the length of these films agrees we’d literally rather watch an art film like stalker instead of these absolute meandering snooze fests.

Cocomelon is literally memetically designed to make your children demons. Its creators are spiritually/ontologically evil and they will reincarnate either into a cockroach’s or into durian fruit.

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