Film students who can no longer sit through films
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
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.
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.
Plenty of people have a job that gives them money, yet they also get pleasure and satisfaction from their job.
I think you are referring to studies that show that payment can paradoxically be demotivating. But that isn't always true.
My wife and I have been at it for perhaps 6 years now. We probably have 3 years or so to go to finish it.
You do learn, I think, patience. I found long slow films tedious initially but have come to know why some film are that way and I am more willing now to just go with the flow.
To be sure though, any film over two or so hours we might split across two days to watch.
https://www.phi-phenomenon.org/
It's merging dozens of "greatest films" lists into a single "master" list.
https://letterboxd.com/beaugunderson/stats/#:~:text=LIST%20P...
FWIW, the "1001" has introduced me to a number of Czech (Obchod na korze, Sedmikrásky, Ostře sledované vlaky, Hoří, má panenko, Marketa Lazarová, Ucho) and Polish (Popiól I Diament, The Saragossa Manuscript, Człowiek z marmuru, Człowiek z żelaza) films.
I'm only up to the 1980's though, there may be a few more.
I'm not aware of having seen any Hungarian films (yet).
Excellent! You've watched some brilliant Slavic films already then, especially Marketa Lazarova and The Saragossa Manuscript. I have these two in my favourite films of all time list. I hope you enjoyed them as much as I did.
Here are some of my favs: Ziemia obiecana (1975), Sanatorium pod klepsydrą (1973), Pociąg (1959), Kanal (1957), Holubice (1960), Slnko v sieti (1962), Zlaté kapradí (1963), Údolí včel (1968), Csillagosok, katonák (1967), A Pál utcai fiúk (1968), A tanú (1969), Kárhozat (1988), Két félidő a pokolban (1961), Szindbád (1971), Szürkület (1990), Dacii (1967), Danton (1983), O slavnosti a hostech (1966), Pădurea spînzuraților (1965), Reconstituirea (1968), and Добро пожаловать, или Посторонним вход воспрещён (1964).
Here's an example of a Mubi list (not my list and not my account): https://mubi.com/en/lists/vintage-japanese-horror
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?
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.
Sounds about right.
I suspect that attention is naturally tuned to work towards genuine interests which may be orthogonal to conventional value producing tasks
Because they want to, or are forced by their social circle, have a college degree credential, and this is the one that matched closest to their interests (they like watching stuff).
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.
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...
If you only watch the story-driven scenes in Lawrence of Arabia, and skip the prolonged shots of the desert, you would miss out feeling the same vastness and heat Lawrence is feeling.
There is a limit to how much a film can make you think or feel. Films that reach the highest limits need "boring" voids in-between the primary scenes. These voids are not to ingest more, but to help digest what has been ingested in previous scenes, with subliminal scenes and silence that let the right thoughts and feelings grow.
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.
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.
This is not about how movies are paced, it's about the way phones have changed attention spans.
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.
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.
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.
I would think a film studies class might not want to spend so much time on a single film, so maybe several scenes would be more appropriate.
At no point was it "boring"
Star Wars, Enter the Dragon, Game of Death, Mad Max, and many Bond films are fun counterexamples.
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.
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.
It might have been John Wick 2 or 3.
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)
That was my friends' recent experience and it was just ridiculous. They were late and still had to watch ads.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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's a red flag in and of itself, and it should prompt you to ask yourself why you can't sit through a whole movie. 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 sort of 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 provide an objective lens to view yourself through. How would you know if you did have a problem with your attention span, if not by monitoring yourself for the coping strategies which a person with a low attention span would use?
> 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 watch it but watch the obviously not-so-good parts at 2x speed.
> But if you find yourself doing this consistently, how can you be sure that the problem isn't on your end?
The fact that I've written screenplays, learned acting, done script analysis on literally hundreds of scenes from movies and television shows in educational contexts, lit scenes, shot scenes with actors, and edited them together?
I'm fast forwarding because I have a halfway decent knowledge of some of the craft and I don't feel like wasting my time with segments that exist purely for emotional heightening but little else. Empty calories, if you will.
There's no problem with my expectations, I assure you. I suggest you look in the mirror and ask why you feel so compelled to insist, judgmentally, that your way of watching movies is the right way, and speculate that a different way is somehow a sign of a problematic attention span. You're trying to insist you know some superior way of watching movies. Consider that, just maybe, you don't know as much as you think you do.
Not once have I told anyone else how they should watch movies. Meanwhile, the person I'm responding to is telling me how I should watch differently.
See the difference?
And "It's boring. [...] Just speed it up and improve your experience." comes across pretty close to telling people what to do, at least as much as what bccdee said.
Is it only me that think this is exactly a short attention span?
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.
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
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.
And it's not like you're "wasting your time" by properly paying attention to ten minutes of atmospheric scene-setting in a two-hour movie. You've set aside two hours already. Make the most of them.
Directors aren't infallible. They frequently make movies that are too long. Making the most of my two hours sometimes requires playing some of the overlong parts at 2x speed, because they often don't pay dividends at all. It has nothing to do with "putting in the work of paying attention", it's just not worth it.
There is definitely something. Nothing to pay attention to would be a silent black screen.
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.
Also you don't really need to be a composer to be able to enjoy film music during a film.
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)
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.
He's not the only one. Almost all current long form TV series do this. There are a few exceptions but it's now the norm.
Aesthetics sure can change a lot, even within a single lifetime.
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.
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.
Screw off with this "you're holding it wrong" nonsense. Sometimes the work is bad, but it has good components or elements and you can still enjoy those however you want. I stuck with the series because I was hoping there would be some redeeming aspects by the end, but it didn't pay off.
> 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).
Did you always do this or did you start doing this in the past, say, 10 years or so?
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.
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.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Save_the_Cat!:_The_Last_Book_o...>
Introduction of character.
Dialogue.
Gratuitous sex scene.
Machiavellian discussion.
Reference to earlier episode.
Cliffhanger.
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.
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.
Those are typically the movies where I just end up turning it off and reading a synopsis. Some movies just aren’t that good.
It's the equivalent of going to a restaurant and being served a nice steak with a side of shit. You can just eat the stake and ignore the shit. The dish would be better if they replaced the shit with something good like mashed potatoes, but you can still enjoy the steak. This is how the contrarians read to me: "Noooo, but the shit side dish is an essential component to the culinary experience that the chef's team prepared, it's their vision."
Case in point [1]
Observations are evidence. Evidence is not proof.
For my first time, I made the mistake of renting a VHS and watching it on a 19" TV. Heard this was a good SF movie, guess I'll check it off my list. Yeah, no. What I saw later in a 70mm cinema was the same content, same story, same words and images, but a very different movie. The setting and presentation made all the difference between a seemingly-pointless waste of time and a profound life experience.
That said, what we saw isn't what Kubrick filmed. Bowman's exercise sequence was originally a full 10 minutes long, just pacing around in circles, and a few other sequences including the Dawn of Man prologue were also much longer. Audiences in 1968 weren't buying it. Kubrick had to tighten things up, because complaining about the audience's attention span wasn't the option back then that it apparently is now.
"I love pizza. But I also slather it in hot sauce to disguise the flavor"
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'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.
I love some of Tarkovsky, but some of it is very slow e.g. Nostalgia and Stalker.
Why would you think it's an outdated format for the current generation if not for their loss of attention span?
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.
I don't think film students today are less interested in film. Their attention spans are shot.
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.
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.
There's an enormous thematic subtext of surveillance state and paranoia running in the background of The Conversation that is "informationally dense", 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.
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.
Movies are getting longer, not shorter. I wish we could go back to the 2 hour feature.
Wow, is there any evidence of this?
What changed? It's not like there's a lot of money in film, so I struggle to understand the motivations there.
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.
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...
‘A Recipe for Idiocracy’: What happens when even college students can’t do math anymore?
(The Atlantic, Nov. 2025)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think a film student would often be asking themselves why it was shot that way and what they might do differently.
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.
Cocomelon is literally memetically designed to make your children demons. Its creators are spiritually/ontologically evil and they will reincarnate either into a cockroach’s or into durian fruit.
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.
Now what?
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.
"In contrast[to drug withdrawal], smartphone dependence is driven by digital stimuli and psychological-behavioral mechanisms, with almost no physical dependence; withdrawal mainly causes psychological discomfort (such as restlessness) without severe physical reactions. Its health risks are mostly indirect (like vision loss, sleep disorders), and withdrawal can generally be improved through behavioral adjustments."
I can find you 10 more but I doubt it would change your outlook.
Again, I'm not saying our relationship with smartphones is healthy. I'm saying addiction is a specific thing, and this isn't it. Getting strung out on heroin is not anything like using your phone too much.
> Professors are now finding that they can’t even get film students—film students—to sit through movies.
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
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.
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.
(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.
This is really silly. Just fail them. They are not customers.
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.
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.
The serious ones are all either already working in the industry or studying at the super-competitive National School of Drama.
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.
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.
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.
You sound like those people who think Battleship Potemkin is the greatest movie of all time.
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?
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 they use trying to grab it. Being bitter and blaming everything, but themselves, is just showing how irrelevant they have all become.