> 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.
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.
"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.
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)
Is it a loss of attention span, or is the 2-hour feature film simply an outdated format for the current generation?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.
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", 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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?
> 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.
This comment is profoundly tragic to me, for as absurd as it sounds to us now, I imagine it will eventually become common sentiment. Our culture is changing so rapidly.
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.
I don't know your friend's situation, but students who've been raised on screens may struggle a lot more to concentrate even on things they like than people who came across screens in adult life.
Anyone that wants their own private "film school", can invest 10 years or so and work through the "1001 Movies to See Before You Die" [1]. It's a book compiled by several film critics as I understand it. For each of the films there's a page or two explaining the significance of the film (according to the critic that chose it for the list).
My wife and I have been at it for perhaps 6 years now. We probably have 3 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.
> A friend of mine has a terrible Instagram addiction, yet has developed for himself a certain degree of cinephilia lately -- we've watched long movies together in theaters and not once has he been on his phone during the screenings. When one has faith that sustained attention might hold more value than that gained by interruption, they tend to prioritize the former.
I'm not convinced that you've fingered the reason. Pulling out your phone at the theater is considered anti-social behavior, comparable to conversing with your seatmate, and that sort of normative pressure can overcome a compulsion. It's like claiming that someone couldn't possibly be an alcoholic because they don't drink on the job.
A better test would be: What does your friend do when you watch a movie at one of your homes, where there's a lesser expectation to tuck away one's phone? Does he still watch the movie attentively, or does he check his phone every so often?
> Why are these people even studying film? The inattention is clearly caused by disinterest.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
66 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 74.6 ms ] threadNow what?
This is really silly. Just fail them. They are not customers.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Movies are getting longer, not shorter. I wish we could go back to the 2 hour feature.
What changed? It's not like there's a lot of money in film, so I struggle to understand the motivations there.
> 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.
Did you always do this or did you start doing this in the past, say, 10 years or so?
"I love pizza. But I also slather it in hot sauce to disguise the flavor"
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.
Observations are evidence. Evidence is not proof.
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.
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.
[1] https://1001films.fandom.com/wiki/The_List
https://www.phi-phenomenon.org/
It's merging dozens of "greatest films" lists into a single "master" list.
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?
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).
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.
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.
I think a film student would often be asking themselves why it was shot that way and what they might do differently.
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.
(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.