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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

#41

Post by lexiathan »

In defense of the students: the types of films that you watch as part of a film study curriculum are generally not the same as what most cinema-goers are watching. For example, "Man with a Movie Camera"--or 150 minutes of someone's black and white movie about the life of urban pigeons... present-day film students who grew up watching movies with tight editing, fast cuts, high resolution color and sound, and quick narrative payoffs are not going to respond to these movies the same way that people did a century ago.

This is not to say that historical films lack value; but sitting all the way through them with rapt attention is not necessarily as easy as you'd imagine.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#42

Post by AlienRobot »

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Is it a loss of attention span, or is the 2-hour feature film simply an outdated format for the current generation?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.

>their brains are just optimized for high-frequency information processing

Wow, is there any evidence of this?

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#44

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

yladiz wrote: post #23
crazygringo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They literally are customers. They pay money in exchange for an education and a degree. You start failing too many students, it becomes a risky place to enroll, enrollment drops, they can't cover their expenses, and they close. Edit: I'm not defending this, just explaining it. It's inevitable under a private education system, unless you literally legislate and enforce grading on a curve within all private institution…

They are paying for the education, but not for the degree, and they’re not paying to get a passing grade even if they do poorly. I wouldn’t necessarily agree that we should just fail the students, clearly something is going on if the professor has to use a curve unexpectedly, but we shouldn’t just accept this as okay simply because they are paying.

I think we're all in agreement about what should be the case, but in practice I think the majority are buying a degree and don't care about learning beyond the minimum they need in order to earn or fake their way into a job. Look at how people are flocking to AI. The typical person wants a button to press to give them an answer or complete a task. Every day we see headlines about people carelessly accepting laughably wrong LLM output.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#45

Post by [deleted] »

yladiz wrote: post #23
crazygringo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They literally are customers. They pay money in exchange for an education and a degree. You start failing too many students, it becomes a risky place to enroll, enrollment drops, they can't cover their expenses, and they close. Edit: I'm not defending this, just explaining it. It's inevitable under a private education system, unless you literally legislate and enforce grading on a curve within all private institution…

They are paying for the education, but not for the degree, and they’re not paying to get a passing grade even if they do poorly. I wouldn’t necessarily agree that we should just fail the students, clearly something is going on if the professor has to use a curve unexpectedly, but we shouldn’t just accept this as okay simply because they are paying.

[deleted]

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#46

Post by IshKebab »

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…

Yeah given some are saying there's no difference, I'd probably put this down to "kids these days" that literally every generation imagines.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#47

Post by ttoinou »

lexiathan wrote: post #41

In defense of the students: the types of films that you watch as part of a film study curriculum are generally not the same as what most cinema-goers are watching. For example, "Man with a Movie Camera"--or 150 minutes of someone's black and white movie about the life of urban pigeons... present-day film students who grew up watching movies with tight editing, fast cuts, high resolution color and sound, and quick nar…

Yeah but you have to watch Man with a Movie Camera with a good soundtrack like The Cinematic Orchestra one. Then it becomes the best non verbal movie ever.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#48

Post by bronlund »

dangus wrote: post #30
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.

I do sometimes think about slow burn movies and how they are hard to find outside of Oscar bait type of pictures. Just looking at kids movies, something like My Neighbor Totoro has many scenes involving ambient sound with no dialog or background music, and it’s a major contrast compared to today’s 3D dopamine festivals. On the other hand, that might just be survivorship bias. I’m cherry picking the best kids movie of…

A 2.5 hour movie that don’t make any sense even.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#49

Post by semilin »

bronlund wrote: post #29

There is no attention-span crisis, it’s just that the younger generation find a lot of stuff utterly boring. If they do something they love, they have no issue focusing for hours and hours.

This is reductive. It's true that interest conquers inattention, but the attention span crisis really represents a prioritization of exploitation over exploration. That is to say that many people are far less able to seek value in things which require more effort in the finding (e.g., long-form media such as books and movies). You could reasonably argue that this is not a real problem, but it is undeniably happening.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#50

Post by u1hcw9nx »

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…

Good point. Maybe "film student" is the modern version of "studied art history".
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