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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

#81

Post by mmooss »

WalterBright wrote: post #68
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…

Once you know about "Save The Cat!" it becomes boring to watch a movie that follows the formula. I noticed even back in the 80s that too many movies ended in the "chase through the darkened warehouse". The movie will be doing fine, until somehow the hero and villain wind up in a dark, abandoned warehouse, ship, factory, whatever. Then they have a long, drawn out fight. Then the bad guy gets killed. Movie over? Nope.…

I try not to think too much in those circumstances. It's often better not to know, not to notice, though it's not always possible.

People like genre and formula; it's not necessarily a negative - pop songs follow structures and formulas over and over. Also, creative artists can innovate by varying those structures and playing with expectations that don't exist in less formulaic creations.

There is plenty of non-formulaic film (and other arts) if you want it? I'm sure you must know that.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#82

Post by vitaelabitur »

IshKebab wrote: post #46
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.

The word you are looking for, if you are looking for one, is declinism.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#83

Post by bronlund »

semilin wrote: post #76
bronlund wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just not true. My daughter, who finds school boring to the point of depression, has no problem spending hours reading the complete Akira manga in a foreign language. The crisis you are talking about is not in the people, but in the system.

It can be both. I went through a very similar experience with school -- it was miserably boring to me, and I found solace in valuable and educational experiences I sought out myself at home. In this way I empathize strongly and I agree that the schooling system is massively flawed in this regard. Still, from my just-as-anecdotal observations, it seems to me that social media addiction exacerbates the issues. I and ma…

Good point.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#84

Post by brycewray »

bloqs wrote: post #7

Just needs to be broken down into series of scrollable short format clips with different dramatic snippets of distorted music over each one

And every line of dialog shown, no more than five words at a time, in all-caps and bold-faced yellow superimposed text in a font that resembles a comic book sound effect.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#85

Post by azinman2 »

jfengel wrote: post #55
azinman2 wrote: post #16

This is so tragic. How are these folks going to lead the world when they cannot pay attention to anything?

Not sure if you're being sarcastic. A lot of the people currently running the world seem to have poor attention spans as well. Others have great attention spans, and I wish they'd pay attention to something different. I'm not scared of the kids today running the world differently. Maybe it'll suck but I don't think the way it's running now is any great shakes, either.

I’m not being sarcastic. Running the world is more than just who is president… it’s who your doctors are, your electrical repairmen, your nannies, etc. It’s not like this is the only example of where the younger generation is different… we see reports everywhere that college students cannot read full sentences anymore. When you have such a generational lag (independent of outliers), it drags all of society down.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#86

Post by kmijyiyxfbklao »

crazygringo wrote: post #61
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…

> If there's nothing to pay attention to during those sequences then the whole movie isn't worth it To the contrary, the rest of the movie can be great. I'm not going to skip a movie entirely just because a couple of sections could have been a lot tighter, that would be silly. > Can you give an example of a movie you enjoyed but had to skip sections of that way? Not a movie, but I found myself doing it a huge amount…

I'm OK with you re-editing the movie as you watch it, but you can't say you watched the same movie as other people that don't do that.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#87

Post by bigthymer »

ksymph wrote: post #52
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…

That was my thinking too. Not everyone has been or will be interested in (slow) movies, but historically those people wouldn't be studying film. It's not exactly a lucrative field.

I wonder if the students are going into film but actually just want to work in social media in which case it all makes sense.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#88

Post by sowbug »

endominus wrote: post #53

Why did the author feel the need to throw in a spoiler for the end of The Conversation in the last paragraph of the article? That seems contradictory to the point of everything else she wrote and disrespectful to both the audience and the film.

She put it at the end of the article. If her premise is correct, it will remain safely unread.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#89

Post by crazygringo »

kmijyiyxfbklao wrote: post #86
crazygringo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If there's nothing to pay attention to during those sequences then the whole movie isn't worth it To the contrary, the rest of the movie can be great. I'm not going to skip a movie entirely just because a couple of sections could have been a lot tighter, that would be silly. > Can you give an example of a movie you enjoyed but had to skip sections of that way? Not a movie, but I found myself doing it a huge amount…

I'm OK with you re-editing the movie as you watch it, but you can't say you watched the same movie as other people that don't do that.

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 time, they're different movies. So I'm OK with watching a different movie, same as everybody else.

Often, when there's a really powerful scene, I'll rewatch it two or three times before continuing, too. Because there's more richness than I can capture with just one viewing, and I want to feel like I experience it fully before moving on. So that makes it a different movie too. I'm not going to let someone else dictate my experience.

Re: Film students who can no longer sit through films

#90

Post by tartoran »

sodapopcan wrote: post #12
tartoran wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get off them. Many started to already.

I'm just about one month into a flip phone. I still spend way too much time on my laptop when I'm home (and I'm home a lot) but I'm not missing my iPhone at all. When I am out, though, it's nice not having the option to look at the internet. Instead I pet my dog, talk to people, or just look around and think like I used to all those years ago.

Question, how do you fare with a flip phone and SPAM SMS/text messages? Smart phones can at least contain them, silence them, mark them as junk etc..
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