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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

#211

Post by pier25 »

crazygringo wrote: post #127
pier25 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sure, technically speaking. And if I had great interest in the minutiae of set design, or if I were a score composer interested in the exact musical instrumentation, or a director studying suspenseful timing, then sure I'd be interested. But I'm not any of those things. I prefer to spend my time on things I'm actually interested in, rather than on things I'm not. If I can fast-forward the "not" part, it makes life be…

Well yeah but "there's nothing that interests me" vs "there's nothing to pay attention to" are very different statements.

Also you don't really need to be a composer to be able to enjoy film music during a film.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#212

Post by Dylan16807 »

crazygringo wrote: post #190
bccdee wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

Why are you even trying to argue this? You're repeatedly saying things like: > 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? That's nonsense. You don't know if a movie is mediocre or consistently good until you watch it. Or it might be mostly very good with some not-so-good parts, in which it's better to w…

You're getting just as judgemental as them about what works better. And trying to pull rank isn't going to make you right.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#213

Post by AngryData »

blindriver wrote: post #128
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…

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…

I think part of the problem too is there being so much slop content now that isn't worth paying 100% to which primes people to use their phone while watching for example netflix. And there is no differentiation between "higher quality pay attention to me content" that loses value by not paying attention and "quick and dirty low budget background movie" that loses value by paying attention to everything outside of a few key moments that covers the basic story line.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#214

Post by steve1977 »

tayo42 wrote: post #176
steve1977 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

They also allow for much better subscriber retention.

But the same applies. If attention span was not an issue, the episodes could be longer and allow for even more interesting development. ;)

Also see what Netflix is doing for example, with explaining the plot multiple times and often very literally. You could even argue that multiple episodes are necessary today so that the plot can be explained explicitly and repeated enough often so it sticks.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#215

Post by Dylan16807 »

socalgal2 wrote: post #122
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…

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.…

> Pluribus

The episodes vary from 43 to 63 minutes because that's what the director thought worked best. The season is 9 episodes long.

I extremely doubt anything in there is filler.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#216

Post by pmg101 »

elpocko wrote: post #78
llbbdd wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not the first person I've seen say that they do that with movies and I just can't put myself in your shoes. If there's nothing to pay attention to during those sequences then the whole movie isn't worth it, if I felt like juggling the fast forward for a movie I would just turn it off. It's like cropping the intentional negative space around a painting or skipping over dramatic silence in a musical piece. Tensi…

I skip forward whenever someone starts singing, or there's a prolonged dance scene, or pointless montages with music. For example the Zion dance party in The Matrix Reloaded. Or the many movies showing people dancing at the wedding party for several minutes. Taylor Sheridan shows: let's show a bit of nature with some country music playing for 20-30 seconds for no reason at all -- five times in a 42 minutes episode.

All I can suggest is that you watch some of Adam Curtis's work.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#217

Post by rurban »

If they cannot sit through essentials, like The Conservation, Jules and Jim or Jeanne Dielman, just fail them. For further filtering let's add Andrei Rublev, and the classes will better. We always filtered out 80% of our students in the first year to get healthy classes and get any work done

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#218

Post by mna_ »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #207
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…

Anyone that wants their own private "film school", can invest 10 years or so and work through the "1001 Movies to See Before You Die" [1]. It's a book compiled by several film critics as I understand it. For each of the films there's a page or two explaining the significance of the film (according to the critic that chose it for the list). My wife and I have been at it for perhaps 6 years now. We probably have 3 year…

That's a good list, but it's quite a western list. It's missing some great films from Socialist era Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, etc. If you'd like to know some of my favourites, just let me know.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#219

Post by jeffreygoesto »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #198
jeffreygoesto wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Right. Saw it on 70mm as well. But I also read the book first, that made the movie provide pictures and some self made substances in my brain.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#220

Post by panda-giddiness »

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…

> 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 prioritize the former.

I'm not convinced that you've fingered the reason. Pulling out your phone at the theater is considered anti-social behavior, comparable to conversing with your seatmate, and that sort of normative pressure can overcome a compulsion. It's like claiming that someone couldn't possibly be an alcoholic because they don't drink on the job.

A better test would be: What does your friend do when you watch a movie at one of your homes, where there's a lesser expectation to tuck away one's phone? Does he still watch the movie attentively, or does he check his phone every so often?

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