[HN Gopher] Film students who can no longer sit through films
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Film students who can no longer sit through films
https://archive.md/GFWzW
Author : haunter
Score : 96 points
Date : 2026-01-31 16:26 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| OK, phones & social media are obviously dangerously addictive.
|
| Now what?
| tartoran wrote:
| Get off them. Many started to already.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| 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.
| tartoran wrote:
| 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..
| mym1990 wrote:
| 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!
| sho_hn wrote:
| It's a bit more useful, in that the consensus on "phone use
| bad" is still a lot more shaky than "heroin bad".
| bccdee wrote:
| 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 medical language to discuss them,
| and doing so is misleading. You can actually just stop
| using Instagram Reels. It's nothing like heroin. It's a bad
| habit, and you can just turn it off.
| rabf wrote:
| Install Davinci Resolve on your phone.
| nottorp wrote:
| On a tangent, maybe we can save reading by doing more flash
| fiction?
| semilin wrote:
| Short stories. At my high school (from which I graduated a few
| years ago) practically no one read anything assigned. Yet I
| observed in a short story class I took that at least the
| majority of students consistently read the stories, and this
| led to insightful discussions. High value ideas that are quick
| to absorb but slow to understand are a better avenue to
| appreciating long-form literature.
| bloqs wrote:
| Just needs to be broken down into series of scrollable short
| format clips with different dramatic snippets of distorted music
| over each one
| philipallstar wrote:
| And mirrored to avoid copyright detection.
| bitwize wrote:
| Don't forget Subway Surfers along the sides!
| actionfromafar wrote:
| With someone peeling a carrot on half of the screen.
| D13Fd wrote:
| And an outrage-inducing political bent.
| brycewray wrote:
| 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.
| philipallstar wrote:
| > Smith has administered similar exams for almost two decades; he
| had to grade his most recent exam on a curve to keep students'
| marks within a normal range.
|
| This is really silly. Just fail them. They are not customers.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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 institutions, which doesn't seem to be a popular idea
| among voters in free democracies either.
| appreciatorBus wrote:
| Yes.
| yladiz wrote:
| 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.
| kranner wrote:
| Film studies is kind of well known for being a vanity
| degree for rich people's kids. At least all the film
| studies students I know from India who're studying in the
| US are without exception the kids of super-rich businessmen
| and politicians.
|
| The serious ones are all either already working in the
| industry or studying at the super-competitive National
| School of Drama.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| 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.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Teachers/Professors are some of the biggest oppressors in
| society. They directly decide who gets to be poor and who gets
| to be wealthy.
|
| Every negative grade they give is robbery of food out of your
| children's mouth. There's a reason they get their backs against
| the walls first during revolutions.
|
| The book that coined the term "Meritocracy" was extremely
| critical of the concept for a reason. It is bad to try to have
| one and good to destroy the concept.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
| actionfromafar wrote:
| This actually made me a little angry, to my surprise. :-D
|
| I thought film student was almost like a holy calling, an
| opportunity that passed me by. Clearly, it's just the equivalent
| to another biz management course to some of these students.
| mmooss wrote:
| If you have that passion, you should study film - it's never
| too late, and your passion will take you much further than the
| people just taking courses. You won't regret it.
|
| It's like people in IT who went to some technical degree
| factory and got a certification, compared to those who took
| apart their parent's computer, figured out how to install
| Linux, hacked their own drivers and apps, etc.
| rwc wrote:
| "Many students are resisting the idea of in-person screenings
| altogether. Given the ease of streaming assignments from their
| dorm rooms, they see gathering in a campus theater as an
| imposition."
|
| Students telegraphing to the film world that a coming generation
| of consumers simply won't be going to the theatre. The article is
| framed as a tragedy about the students, but it's actually a
| tragedy about the professors and institution of moviegoing.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| So Quibi had the right idea, just a decade too early?
| pier25 wrote:
| I love movies but in the last 5-6 years I've only been 3 times
| to the theater. Dune 1, Dune 2, and Oppenheimer.
|
| Theaters in my area couldn't care less about image and sound
| quality. Audiences don't seem to care at all about movies. Most
| are either on their phones or talking.
|
| I'm not paying exorbitant prices for such sub par experience.
| I'd rather watch the movie at home with 4K DV on an OLED
| display and an Atmos setup.
| bluescrn wrote:
| The reality is that the home movie experience is now better.
|
| Seeing a film on the big screen was still a great experience
| back in the 80s and early 90s when the home experience was VHS
| and a smallish CRT with mono audio.
|
| It started to change when DVD arrived, but then we reached the
| era of affordable large LCD TVs, blu-rays, and then streaming.
| And now a lot of people have a 'big screen' at home. With a
| volume control and pause button. Better drinks (including
| alcohol) and snacks without paying the premium price, without
| having to drive anywhere. And no kids throwing popcorn around,
| or other people talking during the movie or other phones going
| off during quiet moments...
|
| (That and the decline of movies. Maybe I'm just getting old and
| miserable, but there's been very little that's got me excited
| in recent years. Maybe I'll get out to a cinema for Project
| Hail Mary, loved the book and the trailers look promising)
| Tade0 wrote:
| Also no forty minutes of ads before the actual movie.
|
| That was my friends' recent experience and it was just
| ridiculous. They were _late_ and still had to watch ads.
| azinman2 wrote:
| This is so tragic. How are these folks going to lead the world
| when they cannot pay attention to anything?
| cat-snatcher wrote:
| 30 seconds at a time
| p1esk wrote:
| Did kids pay attention 100 years ago?
| PeterStuer wrote:
| If they did not they would lose some digits or limbs working
| unsafe machinery etc.
| bdcp wrote:
| Kids no, students yes?
| SkyeCA wrote:
| Just let AI run the world. It quite literally can't do any
| worse than our existing leaders.
| jfengel wrote:
| 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.
| azinman2 wrote:
| 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.
| bogdart wrote:
| If the film students are not able to sit through a film, they
| just are needed to be kicked out, that's it.
| treelover wrote:
| 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.
| appreciatorBus wrote:
| It's also possible that long films were always an abomination,
| existing solely to pad the maker's ego, and they were only
| tolerated previously because the of a dearth of alternatives.
| dangus wrote:
| 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 its decade and comparing
| it to Boss Baby 2.
|
| Finally, I'd also say my default read of articles like this are
| that they're probably idle "the kids these days are bad"
| concern bait.
|
| A professor complaining that his students won't do their
| homework is not new and it's not news. It is a statistical
| certainty.
|
| Avatar 3 is making a billion dollars on people willing to sit
| through a 2.5 hour movie.
| bronlund wrote:
| A 2.5 hour movie that don't make any sense even.
| steve1977 wrote:
| > 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?
| watwut wrote:
| Because they can focus on different movies. Americans few
| decades ago found internarional movies boring, did not
| focused, but could focus on American movies.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I don't think people can focus on any movies anymore,
| period.
|
| I used to host movie night for the friend group, because I
| was the one with a decent home theater setup, but we
| stopped because people just can't get through movies
| anymore. Same with family. We'd always put on a movie at
| night when family were over for a visit, but we don't
| anymore. Within 5 minutes of the movie starting, everyone's
| on their phones or getting up to do other things. Why even
| bother hosting?
|
| I even let the guest(s) choose the movie so they're not
| subjected to all that boring "character development" and
| "establishing shots" in movies I go for, and they still
| can't make it more than 5-10 minutes. My teenage kid can't
| even make it through movies with zero quiet parts, designed
| specifically for that age group. Not into it at all--she
| puts YouTube on at 2x-2.5x speed and "watches" two videos
| at a time while playing video games.
| Fricken wrote:
| I was a film student in the 90s, I would watch a dozen
| films over a weekend. Now, if I want to sit through a
| film and give it my full attention I have to either go to
| a movie theatre or break the movie up into a series of
| bite-sized segments. If I want to get lost in a book I
| have to go camping somewhere away from any cell towers.
|
| I don't think film students today are less interested in
| film. Their attention spans are shot.
| steve1977 wrote:
| > Because they can focus on different movies.
|
| Not sure if I can follow. What kind of different movies?
| Different 2-hour feature films? The article didn't
| mentioned as much I think.
| tayo42 wrote:
| TV shows are basically mini movies, multiple episodes allows
| for much more interesting stories and development
| AlienRobot wrote:
| >their brains are just optimized for high-frequency information
| processing
|
| Wow, is there any evidence of this?
| alamortsubite wrote:
| I like to imagine it's the same neurological phenomenon as
| Mal de debarquement syndrome[1], but as a result of spending
| too much time on one's phone, rather than choppy waters.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mal_de_debarquement
| steve1977 wrote:
| High-frequency infotainment consumption maybe.
| Cpoll wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| It came out when I was a kid, and I loved every second of
| those long boring sequences in it. 2001 was totally unique.
| I've probably seen it more times than any other movie. Once
| my college dorm went to see it in 70mm. Great memories.
| nephihaha wrote:
| 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.
| _m_p wrote:
| "Information density" is not what works of art provide.
| pier25 wrote:
| That's a way of saying that they need constant stimulation
| which is exactly an inability to focus or a loss of attention
| span.
| l33tbro wrote:
| Rubbish. 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" (lol), 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.
| ksymph wrote:
| 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.
| sowbug wrote:
| "... go into college ..." makes it sound like more of an active
| decision than it is for many students who treat it as four more
| years of high school. It's not surprising that such students
| might pick a major that sounds more fun (movies!!) than
| subjects they already find tedious (more math, more history,
| more foreign language).
|
| I wish I'd taken a year off after high school to get a job and
| at least pretend to earn a living. I wonder whether I might
| have embraced college more if I had.
| taude wrote:
| Career prospects with better odds becoming a Hollywood film
| director than a Junior Developer in software in the age of AI?
| ;). (I joke, I joke.)
| dunham wrote:
| 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.
| bronlund wrote:
| 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.
| semilin wrote:
| 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.
| bronlund wrote:
| 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.
| semilin wrote:
| 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 many peers of mine fell out of reading for fun around
| the beginning of high school, and this was due in part to
| both technology and burnout from school. Screen addiction
| can be an obstruction to activities that one actually loves
| doing, just as school can.
| bronlund wrote:
| Good point.
| alecco wrote:
| Multiple teachers in my family report there is an attention
| crisis. And worse, the kids are addicted to their screens and
| even show signs of withdrawal in class. One case required
| professional intervention and the parents didn't seem bothered
| about it.
| bronlund wrote:
| Just because the kids aren't paying attention to the
| teachers, doesn't mean they are having problem focusing. They
| are probably learning more from their screens, than from the
| teachers. When the only book in town was the bible and the
| only guy who had it was the priest, it made sense to have him
| front and center giving out all the answers. This is not the
| reality anymore and now kids can probably learn better by
| themselves. You should look into the work of Sugata Mitra.
| pier25 wrote:
| Drug addicts can enjoy drugs for hours and hours /s
| bronlund wrote:
| They can make movies more enjoyable too! I think you are on
| to something :)
| bccdee wrote:
| 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.
| bronlund wrote:
| 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.
| bccdee wrote:
| > 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?
| bronlund wrote:
| I have watched it multiple times, and I do understand
| that in order to understand what is great art, you have
| to be familiar with art history.
|
| That being said, blaming the kids for a failed education
| system, is pointing the finger in the wrong direction. It
| is not their attention which is the problem, but the out-
| dated methods used to grab it. Being bitter and blaming
| everything, but themselves, is just showing how
| irrelevant they have all become.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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 movies you study in film school are
| genuinely excruciatingly slow and boring, unless you're hyper-
| motivated. Before mobile phones, you didn't have any choice but
| to sit through it. Now you have a choice. I suspect that film
| students 30 years ago, despite having a "full attention span",
| would also have been entertaining themselves on phones if they'd
| had them.
|
| I _love_ movies. But I also make liberal use of 2x speed and +5s
| during interminably long suspense sequences that are literally
| just someone walking through a dark environment while spooky
| music plays. It 's not that I suffer from a short attention span,
| it's that there's nothing to pay attention to. There's no virtue
| in suffering through boredom.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah given some are saying there's no difference, I'd probably
| put this down to "kids these days" that literally every
| generation imagines.
| vitaelabitur wrote:
| The word you are looking for, if you are looking for one, is
| declinism.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I wasn't but I'm glad you told me, thanks!
| llbbdd wrote:
| 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. Tension and
| mood are built during those slow sequences. Can you give an
| example of a movie you enjoyed but had to skip sections of that
| way?
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _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 across
| both seasons of _The Last of Us_. It 's a great show, but I
| watch it for the personal relationships and stories and
| imaginative element. The "haunted house" parts feel like
| switching from a fascinating TV show to an amusement park
| ride, which has no interest for me. After 15 seconds of it,
| I've already got the tension and mood. I don't need 5 more
| minutes of it. It's incredibly repetitive.
|
| But that's just me -- I'm sure there are other people who
| watch it for the suspense and zombies, and get bored when the
| personal relationship parts go on for too long. I'm not
| judging or even saying that the haunted-house suspense parts
| are bad, just that they don't have much interest for me.
| kmijyiyxfbklao wrote:
| 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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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.
| nephihaha wrote:
| That's perfectly true, but like Heraclitus' river, you
| can have a very similar experience on more than one
| occasion. (After the first time, at least.)
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| But what you are doing isn't the same river twice, it's
| saying "it works on my machine" but not saying you
| patched the binary.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Movies aren't consumed as bit-perfect binaries to begin
| with. They're distributed as files that way, maybe, but
| even the basic viewing and sound conditions are different
| for everyone. Color fidelity, detail, acoustic muddiness
| due to room reverb. Literally _everyone 's_ watching a
| "differently patched binary" if that's how you want to
| think of it.
| elpocko wrote:
| 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.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| I watch almost every movie at 2x and I think it usually makes
| the whole experience better for me. You can tailor your own
| media experiences however you want. If you disagree with a
| director's vision for a movie you can bring your own
| perspective, there's no right or wrong way to watch a movie.
| It's no different to picking out a specific track in an
| album, or finding a hook you really enjoy from a specific
| track and playing it on repeat.
|
| One of the most recent movies I watched and really enjoyed
| was Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. It was an animation
| masterpiece, but I still skipped forward in a couple scenes
| because I don't care about the characters. Some of the
| animation sequences were interesting enough to merit slowing
| down to 1x and even going back to rewatch and analyze them
| in-depth though.
|
| Sometimes I'll encounter a seasonal anime that's quite
| terrible among multiple dimensions but which has few
| interesting aspects like creative art design or a couple
| interesting sequences, so I skim through it to look for those
| details in order to take them in. It's possible to appreciate
| various components of a work without caring for the combined
| result.
|
| One of the things which helped break me out of the normative
| movie-watching perspective was encountering this art project
| where a social media page would post every Spongebob frame in
| order [0]. It made me really start paying attention to a ton
| of minor details that I hadn't noticed previously, increasing
| my appreciation for the work that went into making it happen.
|
| In the past you really had no choice but to submit to the
| director's vision of a work, and you were forced to
| experience it the same as everyone else in the theater. Now
| we have more control than ever to enjoy works however we
| want. Game modding is another variation on this same
| principle: if I think a game has some bullshit mechanics, I
| should be able to patch it and play it however I want.
|
| [0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/every-spongebob-
| frame-i...
| brailsafe wrote:
| > But I also make liberal use of 2x speed and +5s during
| interminably long suspense sequences that are literally just
| someone walking through a dark environment while spooky music
| plays.
|
| Do you do this for movies you're watching on your own for
| enjoyment or that you're required to watch for some reason? I'm
| not particularly interested in film, and have adhd, but can't
| think of a time where I've ever done this, so it's hard for me
| to read your comment and think that while you may not struggle
| with attention per se, such a level of discomfort and
| impatience is like not being able to walk around without
| earbuds in, or go for a hike without a Bluetooth speaker or
| phone
| crazygringo wrote:
| See my reply here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46838651
| gdulli wrote:
| If people are feeling entitled to a certain pace of spectacle
| and action as they write off everything in between as
| virtueless boredom, that's more damaging to the culture than a
| certain percentage simply no longer watching movies. That's how
| we get Netflix dumbing down their movies for everyone. There's
| nuance and value to a scene you may not immediately and
| consciously notice. And on a more meta level, pacing
| contributes to the overall experience of a movie even if
| there's not necessarily important subtext to a given scene that
| doesn't have action or explicit plot development.
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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. The bad guy rises from the dead and has to be
| killed again. Sometimes even a third time.
|
| Then there are movies with the party of 10 people or so. The
| point is to kill them off one by one, each in a gruesomely
| different way, until the star is the only one left. Movies also
| telegraph who in the party is going to die next. It's the
| person who reflects on something innocuous, like "isn't it nice
| to hear the birds singing!". Dead meat, every time. The only
| interesting thing to do with these movies is make bets on the
| order of the deaths.
|
| "Game of Thrones" was interesting because it did not follow any
| formula I could discern, except for the last two seasons.
| mmooss wrote:
| 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.
| nephihaha wrote:
| "Game of Thrones" was interesting because it did not follow
| any formula I could discern"
|
| Introduction of character.
|
| Dialogue.
|
| Gratuitous sex scene.
|
| Machiavellian discussion.
|
| Reference to earlier episode.
|
| Cliffhanger.
| b112 wrote:
| Yes, it's dasterdly!
|
| Almost every movie has a plot. How formulaic. How droll!
|
| I find these sorts of discussions to be strange. Yes,
| stories follow specific methods to convey them. Yes,
| conflict is part of that.
|
| I will agree that too formulaic is a sign of the times. I
| find that many 60s and 70s movies were the most creative
| this way.
|
| The 30s often had movies that were just plays on film. The
| 50s were where the process of filmmaking gelled into
| reality. Not just how to make shots, but also the gear like
| steady cam, and an entire special effects industry,
| stuntmen, whole crops of professionals becoming uniquely
| skilled.
|
| The 60s and 70s were the first generation of those which
| grew up with film as kids. The new medium was more
| understood. Experimentation ensued.
|
| Then it became more formulaic. At least, it seems the way
| to me.
| wincy wrote:
| I only watch movies that are a series of randomly seeded
| intervals of tones at various pitches, random colors,
| with static added in. This ensures I never watch anything
| formulaic or predictable.
|
| More seriously, it is interesting when a movie breaks out
| of a formula, especially in well established tropes, like
| Disney movies. Moana or Encanto come to mind as they
| convey stories where there either isn't really a villain
| (spoilers, Te'Ka is not the villain), and especially in
| Encanto the conflict is more internal family issues than
| anything else.
|
| But sometimes it feels good to just watch those
| archetypal stories. I know people hate on Marvel but the
| Thanos arc with the infinity stones and the snap was such
| a fun ride, over the course of many years. These stories
| are extremely formulaic but still enjoyable because on
| some level we are _wired_ to enjoy these stories.
| mmooss wrote:
| I think you're projecting your personal perferences onto
| everyone else:
|
| > genuinely excruciatingly slow and boring
|
| > there's nothing to pay attention to ... suffering through
| boredom
|
| They are _genuinely_ that way for you, which is fine. Others
| feel differently and that 's just as genuine and valid. For
| many, the film school movies are works of genius, wonders to
| behold and genuinely enjoy. Where you see 'nothing to pay
| attention to', others may see and feel quite a bit.
|
| I can't acquire the sophistication to understand everything in
| the world - there is not nealry enough time in life. But if I
| don't have the understanding to taste the wonders of fine wine
| doesn't mean they don't exist or that the $10 bottle is just as
| good. I'm just missing out and others know more - that's most
| of life (and I listen to them and try to learn a little).
| mpawelski wrote:
| > It's not that I suffer from a short attention span, it's that
| there's nothing to pay attention to.
|
| Is it only me that think this is _exactly_ a short attention
| span?
| crazygringo wrote:
| No, that's incorrect.
|
| A short attention span is when you _can 't_ pay attention to
| things for a long time, even if you want to.
|
| If you can pay attention to things for a long time when you
| _want_ to, then you don 't have a short attention span.
|
| If you'd rather skip over the parts that don't interest you,
| that's just called using your time efficiently.
| jeffreygoesto wrote:
| Did you do that on the first 45 minutes of 2001? SCNR.
| nkrisc wrote:
| > But I also make liberal use of 2x speed and +5s during
| interminably long suspense sequences that are literally just
| someone walking through a dark environment while spooky music
| plays.
|
| Those are typically the movies where I just end up turning it
| off and reading a synopsis. Some movies just aren't that good.
| pier25 wrote:
| > _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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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
| better.
| wizardforhire wrote:
| >Many of the movies you study in film school are genuinely
| excruciatingly slow and boring...
|
| Case in point [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_(1965_film)
| socalgal2 wrote:
| 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. Made up example (Character: "I'm flying to
| Vegas", the 3 minutes of pack, get in car, drive car, get to
| airport, walk through airport, wait in lounge, board plane, sit
| in plane, de-board plane, pick up rental car, drive toward
| city, shots of city, get out of car, see lobby, get in
| elevator, arrive on floor" for 2-3 minutes. You could argue a
| segment like this is supposed to convey tedium or the fact that
| the character is the only person in all of these shots, but
| that was established 3 episodes ago. Now it's just filler. A
| good editor would have cut it but a series like Pluribus has a
| contract to provide X hours of content, and so they fill it up.
|
| Some movies I watched recently:
|
| "The Long Goodbye" (1973) - I'm not recommending it but I found
| it interesting/different enough that I'm glad I watched it.
|
| "Madame De..." (1953) - This one was too slow for me. I stopped
| about half way through. Nothing iteresting had happened.
|
| "The Enchanted Cottage" (1945) - I enjoyed though it was as
| little cloying
|
| "Marked Woman" (1937) - It was overly melodramatic but Betty
| Davis was great at being strong and, I had no idea hostess
| culture was ever a thing in the USA which I found fascinating.
| It's still a thing in many parts of the world (and I have no
| issue with it to be honest)
| blindriver wrote:
| > 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 style,
| etc.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 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.
| bccdee wrote:
| > 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
| character-driven. So what? It's beautiful. You may as well go
| to an art gallery and say the story moves too slow. Look at
| the stuff on the screen. Take it in. You don't have to like
| it, but maybe don't assume that Vince Gilligan is wasting
| your time with filler to make a quick buck. Consider that you
| might be holding it wrong.
| bccdee wrote:
| > I love movies. But I also make liberal use of 2x speed and
| +5s during interminably long suspense sequences that are
| literally just someone walking through a dark environment while
| spooky music plays. It's not that I suffer from a short
| attention span
|
| No, I'm sorry, I do think this is an attention span issue. You
| say there's no virtue in suffering through boredom, but a few
| minutes of scene-setting should not feel painful.
|
| Yes, some movies _are_ boring, but those are bad movies. Turn
| them off. Good movies are made by skilled directors who know
| better than to stick a big boring part in the middle. Taste is
| subjective, of course, but the middle & the end get made by
| the same person. If the middle isn't enjoyable, the end
| probably won't be either; by the same token, if you
| consistently need to skip through the middle parts of movies
| with great endings, you're probably skipping good stuff which
| you might enjoy if you had a greater tolerance for slower, more
| atmospheric cinema. It might seem like sitting through the slow
| parts of a movie would make the experience of watching it
| worse, but I've found that resisting my urge to pull out my
| phone during slow bits has made me enjoy movies more.
|
| Habitually, I spend a lot of time with headphones on, listening
| to podcasts and videos and such. I find that if I do too much
| of this, though, it starts to get me down. Often the best thing
| for my mood is to take off my headphones and just sit with my
| thoughts for a while. I know what you mean by "suffering
| through boredom," but it doesn't need to be painful to sit & do
| nothing for a bit. Once you get used to it, it stops feeling so
| uncomfortable.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Your analysis is extremely simplistic.
|
| > _Yes, some movies are boring, but those are bad movies._
|
| Actually, in real life, otherwise good movies can have some
| less-good parts, and otherwise bad movies can have some
| individual scenes that are great. Life, and art, isn't black-
| and-white.
|
| > _If the middle isn 't enjoyable, the end probably won't be
| either_
|
| You've clearly never taken taken a screenwriting course, or
| analyzed the many many movies with a saggy middle but a great
| ending -- which is actually an _extremely_ common pattern.
| There 's even a name for it, the "second-act slump".
|
| > _but it doesn 't need to be painful to sit & do nothing for
| a bit. Once you get used to it, it stops feeling so
| uncomfortable._
|
| Nobody ever said anything about it being _painful_ or
| _uncomfortable_. It 's just making better use of your time.
| bccdee wrote:
| 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 speaking,
| if it's worth watching the end of a movie, it's probably
| worth watching the whole thing.
|
| > Nobody ever said anything about it being painful or
| uncomfortable
|
| "Suffering through boredom" was how you phrased it.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _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? Just
| speed it up and improve your experience.
|
| There's no moral virtue in forcing yourself to watch
| every single shot at 1x speed, or deciding that if it
| isn't worth watching fully at 1x it isn't worth watching
| at all. That's unhelpful black-and-white thinking.
| bccdee wrote:
| 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, in and of
| itself, should be a red flag. It should prompt you to ask
| yourself why you can't sit through movies. 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 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 give yourself an
| objective lens to view yourself through. How would you
| know if you did have a problem with your attention span?
| djeastm wrote:
| >I love movies. But I also make liberal use of 2x speed and +5s
| during interminably long suspense sequences that are literally
| just someone walking through a dark environment while spooky
| music plays.
|
| Did you always do this or did you start doing this in the past,
| say, 10 years or so?
| viccis wrote:
| >I love movies. But I also make liberal use of 2x speed
|
| "I love pizza. But I also slather it in hot sauce to disguise
| the flavor"
| crazygringo wrote:
| More like "I love pizza. But I don't eat the crust around the
| edge. Because that leaves me more room to eat more of the
| main part which I love more."
| technothrasher wrote:
| > 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 not interested in looking.
| That's not to say that everyone will be interested in, say, how
| the scene is framed, choice of camera focus and depth of field,
| where the lighting is coming from, or where the characters
| placed in relation to each other, but it's all there to observe
| and enjoy if you like it.
| semilin wrote:
| 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 prioritize the former.
|
| 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.
|
| The phenomenon observed here must be caused by a combination of
| the general loss of discipline (which is the fallback attentive
| mechanism when interest is absent) and students' disinterest in
| the field they _chose_ to study. The former has been well known;
| the latter is worth considering more.
| u1hcw9nx wrote:
| Good point. Maybe "film student" is the modern version of
| "studied art history".
| duxup wrote:
| When I was a student I studied a lot of things, I wasn't
| knowledgeable or good at much of any of them.
|
| Sounds about right.
| ksymph wrote:
| 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.
| bigthymer wrote:
| 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.
| illiac786 wrote:
| Very little people really care about a hobby. The ones that do
| are the most visible but the huge mass just isn't passionate.
| rishabhaiover wrote:
| > When one has faith that sustained attention might hold more
| value than that gained by interruption, they tend to prioritize
| the former.
|
| I suspect that attention is naturally tuned to work towards
| genuine interests which may be orthogonal to conventional value
| producing tasks
| deadbabe wrote:
| These "film students" are like the people who take computer
| science just because they like playing video games.
|
| Most of their idea of film is putting together little reels and
| TikToks. "Absolute Cinema" type stuff. They don't actually care
| about movies and the art.
| perching_aix wrote:
| > 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 interested in something is one thing, but then
| being in an environment when that is now a hard expectation is
| another.
|
| It's like the difference between wanting to draw something and
| being forced to draw something. Entirely different playing
| fields.
| wat10000 wrote:
| You might be extremely interested in a field and yet not find
| every part of it to be so interesting. Certainly not everything
| I studied in my computer science degrees was something I cared
| about deeply. I've never studied film, but I'd wager there are
| a number of films that are educationally significant to watch
| but that aren't very entertaining.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| 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
| students. This isn't the first time that lay people are
| objectively better/smarter than so-called "professionals" in a
| field.
| bccdee wrote:
| 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.
| lexiathan wrote:
| 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.
| ttoinou wrote:
| 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.
| lexiathan wrote:
| I'll add it to my list!
| mmooss wrote:
| The prior generation of film students grew up the same way, and
| the one before that. Remember westerns, for example?
|
| If you're a film student, presumably you are interested in the
| art and technique, and then films like "Man with a Movie
| Camera" are fascinating and beautiful. Similarly, Vim does not
| appeal to a public accustomed to simple apps, no learning
| curve, gamification, and lots of graphics; but computer
| professionals see it as a thing of beauty.
| Gimpei wrote:
| I took a bunch of film classes in college and what they're not
| mentioning is that sometimes the films bring assigned are crazy
| boring. I once had to watch an hour of footage shot from a camera
| in an outdoor elevator as it went up and down. One hour. The
| professor said it was the perfect summation of everything he'd
| been discussing over the term. I swear I'm not joking.
| rabf wrote:
| Perhaps as a film student you were meant to be looking at the
| composition, the shot structures, the color grading, the use of
| sound? The film may have been boring in its message or story
| but still a technical masterpiece?
| endominus wrote:
| 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.
| sowbug wrote:
| She put it at the end of the article. If her premise is
| correct, it will remain safely unread.
| bccdee wrote:
| _The Conversation_ came out in 1974, 52 years ago. By any
| reasonable metric, the statute of limitations on spoilers has
| long ago elapsed. If we can 't even mention that Rosebud is a
| sled without some sort of spoiler banner, I think we're letting
| our preciousness about spoilers get in the way of actually
| discussing film.
| metabagel wrote:
| If you're really studying film, there is a lot to pay attention
| to in every scene. If you're just watching films to be
| entertained, then yes, older movies have a slower pace and can
| sometimes be boring.
|
| I think a film student would often be asking themselves why it
| was shot that way and what they might do differently.
| mmooss wrote:
| Often media forms make sense in their original context and make
| less sense the more the current context differs. In classical
| music orchestras, for example, many identical instruments play
| simultaneously, unlike in jazz or blues/folk/rock/pop. IMHO that
| makes more sense in a context without amplification, without few
| sounds are that loud (making it more special and dramatic), and
| in an industrial society where the common solution is lots of
| workers performing identical tasks. We can also think of media
| forms as technologies and see them similarly.
|
| For video the context is shifting: As an hypothesis, the length
| of the media could be viewed as ROI for the required commitment.
| In the context where watching a film required going to a theater,
| 30 seconds or 30 minutes would be poor ROI - you plan, travel,
| give up everything else you're doing, pay ... you'd be unhappy if
| it was over in 30 minutes. In a context where the commitment is
| pulling your phone from your pocket and tapping it a few times,
| 30 seconds can be fine and you usually wouldn't want stand there
| for 2 hours.
|
| Each form has advantages and disadvantages; I think it's a normal
| but clear error to say what came first, what we're more familiar
| with, is better. We do and will lose things with change, but
| we'll gain others. We don't lose them completely - there are
| still classical orchestras though no more riots over a premiere.
| But the energy of innovation is not in classical music, jazz or
| rock - people listen to the old stuff mostly - and maybe less in
| film. I expect that many of the young, innovative geniuses who in
| the past would have made classical music or jazz or rock, or
| written novels, are now making computer games - they are
| embracing the newish frontier, and the exciting thing of their
| youth.
|
| So far, film seems to coexist pretty well; there seems to be
| plenty of creative energy on the high end, but we'll see. What
| about small independent films? What about film schools?
| vitaelabitur wrote:
| We traded books for films, and now films for short videos, always
| moving towards what is easier to enjoy.
|
| Quite a while ago, books became a taste that needs to be
| patiently acquired. Someone starting to read today is more likely
| to develop the taste by gradually easing into books that demand
| more and more. Say maybe Huxley -> Camus -> Wilde -> Dostoevsky.
|
| Now that short clips are here, the same has happened to films.
| The uninitiated need to sit through Scorsese, Hitchcock, Wilder,
| Kubrick, Altman before attempting Fellini, Antonioni, Tarkovsky,
| Ozu, Resnais.
|
| And by the way, someone who is naturally inclined to love films
| (or books) won't be affected, even today. Am I wrong? The way
| they are described here, I would crush these film students.
| jfengel wrote:
| It helped that books were all we had. I probably would have
| preferred little snippets of dopamine, too.
|
| I'm kinda glad I walked across campus glued to a book. But it
| was the same low tolerance for boredom that people show today.
| lalalandland wrote:
| I think TV series are bigger than films now. They have
| established characters and story line spanned over several
| shorter episodes with cliffhangers and recaps etc. Once you get
| into a series you follow it for several seasons. It's a
| preferred way to tell stories.
|
| I usually prefer films over TV series because I find just these
| tropes tiring. I find TV series have quite inefficient story
| telling and spend most of its time trying to get me hooked to
| watch the next episode.
| lysace wrote:
| From a programmer perspective:
|
| (Old man yelling at the sky.)
|
| It's been this exponential progress in distraction (internet,
| social networks, weaponizing human psychology to make money).
|
| I got into programming in the late 80s/early 90s. If I were a
| teenager today, I'm not sure I would have the willpower to suffer
| through enough focused boredom to really learn.
| thefz wrote:
| Maybe try presenting them 15 seconds at a time, in portrait mode
| with bouncy subtitles.
| _m_p wrote:
| Art isn't for everybody.
| pier25 wrote:
| Indeed. But if film is not for you maybe don't study film?
| _m_p wrote:
| 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.
| nizbit wrote:
| Bring back the 90 minute movies!
| jamestimmins wrote:
| 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 long, arguably slow, boring middle. So it's like being
| forced into withdrawal on hard mode.
| rjh29 wrote:
| 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.
| prhn wrote:
| 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 it's created in. I
| don't really think it's fair to expect people to appreciate art
| when it's taken completely out of its context.
|
| Lawrence of Arabia, for example. What a brilliant, brilliant
| film. Beautiful, influential, impressively produced. And really,
| really boring and slow a lot of the time.
|
| If I were a film professor today, hell even 20 years ago, I would
| not expect a modern film student to sit through that whole thing.
| I think it's my job as a professor to understand the context of
| the period, highlight the influential/important scenes, and get
| students to focus on those instead of having to watch 4 hours of
| slowly paced film making and possibly miss the important stuff.
| pier25 wrote:
| The pacing is irrelevant in this context. As a student the main
| point of watching these movies is not entertainment.
|
| Although I will say it's pretty amazing that someone that
| supposedly has an interest in film would not be able to watch
| The Conversation or an even slower film like 2001.
| blindriver wrote:
| 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 helped keep
| them engaged.
|
| This is not about how movies are paced, it's about the way
| phones have changed attention spans.
| acessoproibido wrote:
| 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 films being made that require full
| attention for an extended period of time, many of which are
| also on Netflix. One could argue that there was never a time
| in history where more excellent, deep and complex content was
| being made.
|
| One other part is also that traditional TV (which arguably
| also never required full attention) has been replaced by new
| mediums. Personally I never owned a TV in my life.
|
| The whole argument "phone bad" is a bit lazy IMO and doesn't
| at all take in account the nuance that would be required for
| a serious discussion.
| blindriver wrote:
| 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.
| viccis wrote:
| >And really, really boring and slow a lot of the time.
|
| At no point was it "boring"
| Insanity wrote:
| I guess that might be a modern interpretation. But I do
| disagree as well. I actually prefer older films because of
| the pacing, and fortunately live close enough to the TIFF
| cinema that I can see such films every other week.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| I imagine a film student watching the baptism scene of Michael
| Corleone and thinking it is boring.
| acuozzo wrote:
| > And really, really boring and slow a lot of the time.
|
| It's not boring on a giant display with the original 6-track
| mix playing just a tad too loud all around you. I've seen it in
| 70mm at the AFI in Silver Spring, MD; candy for the eyes and
| ears.
|
| It would likely be boring if played at a quiet volume on a
| small display. This is because movies are, in part, spectacle.
| Cirque du Soleil would likely be boring too if viewed very,
| very far away.
| WCSTombs wrote:
| > If I were a film professor today, hell even 20 years ago, I
| would not expect a modern film student to sit through that
| whole thing.
|
| Sorry, but this to me sounds completely insane. We're not even
| talking about the general population here, but people who are
| ostensibly serious about the art and craft of film making. And
| the bar is being set at literally just watching the movie, and
| not even some obscure marathon of a film that takes a degree to
| be appreciated, but a major mass-released picture that has
| already been enjoyed by countless people.
| zdragnar wrote:
| What seems to be missing for me at least is that I doubt I
| would have done well being assigned entire films on top of my
| regular course load worth of studies.
|
| Paying attention to a film enough to emotionally connect with
| the content, take notes, synthesize an academic understanding
| of subtle things like the use of lighting, sound, camera
| work, etc while also doing the other several hours worth of
| homework from my other classes would be pretty daunting.
|
| Much easier to get the clif notes from the Internet and fake
| it... though I had CS, math and Mandarin courses which were
| way way heavier on the homework side of things than most
| other classes I took, so maybe I'm overthinking it.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| > If I were a film professor today, hell even 20 years ago, I
| would not expect a modern film student to sit through that
| whole thing.
|
| Our local cinematheque has just had a 70mm festival, where they
| of course screened Lawrence of Arabia. All screenings were sold
| out. My mom went to see another screening at the same time, and
| commented on how many young people were going to see Lawrence.
| The past couple of years there has been a strong uptick[1] here
| of younger people flocking to see older films.
|
| [1]: https://www.nrk.no/kultur/analog-film-trender-blant-
| unge-1.1...
| polski-g wrote:
| Then just don't pass them? Like of someone couldn't do calculus,
| you shouldn't give them credit for Calc 101.
| _m_p wrote:
| They're customers.
| 99_00 wrote:
| The ability to focus is not decreasing.
|
| When studies are published talking about "attention span"
| decreasing they mean the amount of time people spend paying
| attention to one thing. They don't mean people's capacity for
| attention is decreasing.
|
| I'm a bit surprised to see this myth is still around, but looking
| at the source maybe I shouldn't be
| Kon5ole wrote:
| We used to read books for 12+ hours, then we started watching
| films.
| esafak wrote:
| My solution would be to filter them out: why are they occupying
| the seats of students who actually like and watch movies? Film
| school is wasted on the TikTok crowd.
| drewda wrote:
| From the same magazine that also recently published a piece
| headlined "The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books"
|
| I do have a print subscription to The Atlantic and appreciate
| some of their coverage, but it's embarrassing how much they're
| always on the lookout for upper-middle-class panics to milk...
| labrador wrote:
| My take is that with the modern availability of so many high
| quality films, we (I) no longer have patience to sit through a
| mediocre films. the opportunity cost is too high.
| l33tbro wrote:
| What this is really about is how we've internalised passive
| consumption of media. The expectation in years gone by was that
| adult audiences could do some of the work themselves is resolving
| the meaning of the text. Art, I believed they called it?
|
| Today the rebrand to 'content' consumption has basically reached
| the equivalent of a kind of entertainment-as-foie gras, where the
| audience is intubated and force fed this conceptually empty
| material that bypasses any critical faculties. The result is this
| intellectually-unburdened generation that I'm sure will natural
| transition to taking hold of the machinery of power in society.
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