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It may be an unpopular opinion, especially on this site, but one thing I enjoy is extensive and long-lasting liturgies. Now I have seen priests who can compress a "low" Catholic Mass into 20 minutes on a weekday. But there is something epic, powerful, and truly transcendent about a liturgy like the Easter Vigil, which can easily top 3 hours. There is a ton of things going on, lots of singing and great arrangements/instrumentation, some really special elements having to do with water, fire, and oil. It's the peak joyful time of the year and a real occasion to celebrate with all the stops pulled out (literally!)
The other masters of long, ornate liturgies are those of the Byzantine Rite (which is, I believe, how "byzantine" came to have its generic meaning.) Christian liturgy is musical theatre before musical theatre was a thing.
One can stretch a liturgy out without approaching the epic: sheer disorganization and even self-indulgence (of the choir, of the homilist) can contribute. I mention this because the same is true of movies.
If your perspective is unpopular with HN readers, my guess would be it's because so many of us have ADD.
I could easily believe HN readers are religious at the same rate as the general population.
To elaborate, for those who aren't familiar, the Easter Vigil when done in its long form includes nine readings instead of the usual 3, and they are considerably longer than the usual ones too. It's also traditionally when converts are accepted into the Church, which, depending on how many there are, can add to the time considerably.
I say all of that to emphasize that it's not long because of a lack of pacing, but because there is a lot going on.
If you like long movies, I highly recommend Sergei Bondarchuk's film of Tolstoy's "War and Peace" - IIRC, more than 7 hours long. I have never seen such dedication to the art of moviemaking.
Sergei Bondarchuk also plays, quite movingly, the "central" role of Pierre, a representation of Tolstoy himself in the story. (His daughter stars in another of my favorite long movies, Andrei Tarkovsky's "Solyaris".)
Mosfilm has uploaded it on YouTube in four parts:
Part 1 https://youtu.be/bIij-KQ0jYU
Part 2 https://youtu.be/uJjqSfdFuUI
Part 3 https://youtu.be/wpKA1meiJzs
Part 4 https://youtu.be/nvDMu5e4xzw
Abel Gance gave us his Napoléon in 1927. About five and a half hours, and originally envisioned as the first of a trilogy—that 5.5 hours only covers his early life and career!
It's awesome, and I hold out faint hope that some rich Hollywood film nerd will finish the trilogy, silent and in black and white.
It's not that a long movie is inherently bad. Indeed, the subtitle here absolutely call out that a three hour film from the right filmmaker could be great!
It's that the financial constraints that previously existed, that would drive filmmakers to a tighter narrative, have been removed. And now there's little constraining the desire to turn in a 180+ minute opus.
Are there stories that need 3 hours, or that can justify that kind of length? Sure. But there's a whole lot of films being released that are far longer than they really need to be. JOHN WICK 4 is almost 3 hours long. That seems absurd. THE BATMAN was a fucking SLOG of a film, and absolutely did not have 3 hours of content. It badly needed editing.
You know who else needs editing? Scorsese. His later films, including and especially the ones called out in the linked article, are fat, fat, fat. No word of it a lie, I'm not sure he's made a film I liked in nearly 20 years.
I thought the Batman absolutely justified its runtime, and for me did not feel like a slog whatsoever. I wished it would go on longer when it ended.
>I'm not sure he's made a film I liked in nearly 20 years
You didn't like Silence (2016)?
He's got one of the best editors in the business https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thelma_Schoonmaker
What about Casino? That always comes back as my favorite movie of his. And at a respectful 178 minutes.
All these declarations that the modern Attention Span is dead are solidly refuted by the popularity of the Long Movie, by multi hour podcasts, and by the binge watching phenomenon made possible by OTT on demand services which allow a 'movie' to extend 12 or 13 hours consumed in two or three sittings by a generation blamed for a collective attention deficit disorder. Ars Longa Vita Brevis.
I don't think that type of "modern Attention Span" is really criticized: If you do a 3 hour binge of tiktok, you could count that as a single span claiming your full attention, right? But nobody would say really that doing a 3 hour tiktok binge would make you a person with a great attention span.
I think the same applies to entertainment broadly: movies, podcasts, tv shows.
Instead I think that the real attention span is not consumer-based, but rather based on interaction with the subject matter. Simply put, I think the level of engagement with a material has to be on a certain level before you can claim it takes attention to consume it.
Yes, a Stranger Things season lasts 8 hours front-to-back, but if you zone out for an hour in between they're still looking for the alien mystery and they're not suddenly going to die because you didn't think along with all the plotpoints.
Contrast that with a university lecture, where if you zone out for 15 minutes you might never catch back up because you need to interact with the material in your head to be able to consume it properly.
I think that nuance is missing if you just say the words "attention span". "Attention" may just be the wrong word, and so I think nothing is really solidly refuted here, and I do indeed think that the attention span is dead.
One of the nice things about ripping the lord of the rings extended edition DVDs to digital files is that I now have a playlist of all files that just runs in a continuous showing. I think it’s 11-13 hours or something. And my friends and family have made it through nonstopped in a single day quite a few times (it’s a Christmas tradition although that usually gets interrupted). There is an intermission after the first and second films as the credits are very long, but it’s amazing how people will stay transfixed to good material.
I think it’s just really hard and rare to make great things and easier to make short, acceptable things that are successful to a lesser, but marginally acceptable level. I call this the “machine learning effect” as it’s regression to the mean and good enough, but not great. The most frequent place I see this is in Amazon recommendation engine where they don’t want you to buy a great book so much as they just want you to buy something, and a perfect transaction is where you only like the book enough not to return it and come back to buy another because you’re unsatisfied.
One of the claims about attention disorders IIRC is that it only affects thing people having to do things they don’t like. Which seems a bit sketchy to me so I probably am misunderstanding but the idea is even kids with adhd can play Minecraft for a day straight because they like it but can’t do math.
> by multi hour podcasts, and by the binge watching phenomenon made possible by OTT on demand services which allow a 'movie' to extend 12 or 13 hours consumed in two or three sittings
Both of those things work because people do other stuff while listening/watching. There are very, very, very few 12+ hour streaming-series "movies" that are improved by paying close attention the entire time, even if you split the watch into two or three sessions—most are better if you check out from time to time, talk to someone, go to the other room to do the dishes, mess around on your phone, play some Switch, whatever.
>are solidly refuted by the popularity of the Long Movie, by multi hour podcasts, and by the binge watching phenomenon
It's only solidly refuted if those aren't skipped to death, or "followed" while the person does 4 other things at the same time. And of course if those represent the main way content is consumed nowadays, and not like a mere small percentage of our consumption. And if the person doesn't watch them while still having the attention span of a goldfish, and e.g. missing any longer narrative threads...
Upvoted but with a caveat. I don't have a TV so I don't have much exposure to what's going on, but last summer I was house sitting and because of the hype of Stranger Things I thought I'd binge-watch it. In two days I watched the first two series completely, then stopped. I got bored because fundamentally nothing really happened to move anything forwards.
I watch a lot of made-for-TV staff on DVD and see a similarity – in football terms it's just time wasting. Long pauses usually filled in with music to give the illusion something is happening, sex scenes, gratuitous violence, people taking offence with unrealistic ease, longshots, slow shots... Anything to hide the fact that there is a lot of empty air. (Oh yes, and the three minute intro that also recaps what happened last time).
It all suggests there's a lot of tolerance for "something happening on screen" independent of whether it's worth watching or basically nothing at all.
All while movie-goers watch TikTok during the movie. Maybe the movies are 3 hours now because you only watch 1 hour 30 minutes of it anyway?
It doesn't take a lot of attention to binge watch a whole Netflix season. It takes attention to read a book.
I don't care about the length of a film as long as it successfully manages not to make me look at the clock to see how long it's going to be.
Yeah, this and a few other comments: I'm firmly in the "a film should be an hour and a half camp", but if I'm captivated enough that doesn't matter. Last one of those for me was Everything Everywhere.
I also think there are two kinds of audience, in a sort of bimodal distribution. Some people are looking to pass the time. As long as you display some nice images, they're happy. They don't mind that the episodes of Stranger Things have got longer, because that's what they're spending their time with. At the other end you have people who constantly feel an awareness of what they could be doing with their time, and once they feel that a filmmaker is wasting it you've lost them.
(Last night's film was, in honor of the death of Harry Belafonte, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World,_the_Flesh_and_the_D... ; much of it is just beautiful long shots of empty New York, and the character parts make heavy use of awkward pauses or unspoken conversations, and yet it's captivating. I suppose I should warn modern audiences that it's also unremittingly ""woke"", and even more so by 1959 standards)
Indeed.
I've yet to read "In Praise Of The Long New Yorker Article".
I feel similarly. There are long movies where I don’t even notice (Carlito’s Way, Gangs of New York) and movies where I definitely notice (The Irishman) and short movies where I check the clock to see when it ends (Lego Movie 2).
Anything longer than 2h needs an intermission so you can take a bathroom break and stretch. Live performances like musicals and opera understand this. Movies do not.
If you're at home, sure, you can pause it whenever. But even then it'd be nice to have a point where the movie explicitly pauses and says "hey things are about to get crazy, go pee".
Thankfully, the Intermission is a hallmark of Indian films. It's a little funny to watch Indian films in the US, since the intermission messaging is part of the film itself, usually at a cliffhanger, the music builds to an emotional high, the 'Intermission' text comes on screen - and the film immediately continues.
Long movies are great at home because I can pause and go pee or make extra food.
They're awful in cinemas tho. I just don't go watch them there.
I can't remember the titles off-hand, but I remember a couple of movies in the last 30 years actually having an intermission.
"The Long Movie" decision is way, way different now that most people don't watch in a theater. At home you can pause it to go to the bathroom, check your social media, or even go to sleep.
Pop songs are longer, too. It used to be nothing over 3 minutes had a chance of getting airplay, but a few brave artists broke that barrier. Now everyone thinks they're David Byrne.
There's artistic expression made better by constraints and ruthless editing, and then there's mindless self-indulgence. Usually you're going to end up in one of those camps, unless you're a lot more talented than most of your audience thinks.
Aside from writing and directing films like Raging Bull and American Gigolo, Paul Schrader as film theorist has christened the genre of long movies as "Slow Cinema." In his thesis Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, Schrader argues that the deliberated depictions in lengthy movies transforms the act of the ordinary into a realm of transcendence.
For a point of reference, Schrader has produced a famous diagram where he identifies acclaimed filmmakers like Tarkovsky, Akerman (mentioned in article), Weerasetakul, Tarr as practitioners of slow cinema[1].
[1] https://www.indiewire.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/figure1...
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Personally, these long films were an experience in themselves:
- Sátántangó, Bela Tarr, 7 hours 18 min
Tarr depicts the countryside as a slow, humdrum experience. By confronting viewers with the elongated pedestrian experiences, the film accentuates the subtle rhythms in everyday life.
- Hitler: A Film from Germany, Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, 7 hours 22 min
Perhaps bombastic, and even pretentious, but Syberberg has successfully constructed his own world from his poetic sentiments. It laments on how the once-noble "Germanism" has been (as put by Susan Sontag) "retroactively tainted" by Hitler.
- Nostalghia, Andrei Tarkovsky, 2 hours 5 min
I know this isn't as long as the other titles, but the penultimate shot of the film is 10 minutes long. It depicts a man walking around holding a candle. While very little happens, the parsimony of the shot directs the audience's attention to the sparse movements, which compounds the until the action is resolved.
Another excellent example of slow cinema is Once Upon A Time In Anatolia. The long night shots of immense fields of windblown grass illuminated by the flickering light of a couple flashlights and some lamps are like Van Gogh paintings. The movie is all atmosphere, but it's entrancing nonetheless.
Goodbye, Dragon Inn is also great. The movie itself isn't very long, but the long shots are pure slow cinema, stillness made into an aesthetic sublime.
i would say any film by tarkovsky, brilliant though they are, could benefit from ruthless editing.
Future projection: Cinemas will become the next arcades.
For a time, arcades were the only way to experience video games, just as cinemas were for films, and, at least through the early 90's, they were still by far the best way to experience most AAA titles like Street Fighter 2, etc.
But game companies wanted more profit than just arcades could bring in, so we got the advent of the home console.
For a time, the arcade technology was still clearly superior to the home console technology, but home consoles quickly eclipsed what the arcades could do,and simultaneously changed the medium massively, allowing us games like RPGs, which had multi-hour-long very immersive and deep gameplay and storytelling that was simply not possible on a cabinet designed to get as many people in and out of it as quickly possible.
In the late 90's, we had games like Final Fantasy 7, something so far removed from the original concept of an arcade game it could only have ever existed as an in-home experience.
What can we learn from the closure of arcades in relation to the fall of theatres?
The experience of media has to be better than what is offered in our homes, to get us to leave them. Cinema has practically passed that tipping point already, especially to anyone with a decent home video/audio system, which is more insanely affordable than ever.
I predict cinemas will, in the next couple decades, very much go the way of arcades - including a small resurgence of 'real', independently-owned cinemas that will exist to give us that nostalgia-laced experience that will be indie enough at the time to be considered hip and retro.
If we want long movies in the cinema, we desperately need to re-introduce the intermission.
Seriously, going to Avatar 2 was a nightmare I think for half the people who saw it because after 1 1/2 hours, your popcorn and drink are empty, your butt is starting to hurt and you need to pee from all that soda you just drank. This is just basic biology.
Not only that, but a 10-15 break in the film provides another opportunity for concession sales, a massive positive for the cinema, and certainly one that could compensate for any schedule readjustments they may have to do.
I simply can't see a negative to an intermission, for either the cinema's profits or for the customer's enjoyment of the experience.
The lack of intermission makes going to the cinema for films of this length a net negative, especially with how much it costs.
I think Avatar 2 may be the last film longer than 2 hours I actually bother to pay to see in the cinema.
I'd describe the experience, especially with the awful, strange and distracting as hell frame rate jumps Avatar decided it needed, as more uncomfortable than enjoyable.
I honestly wish I'd waited and just watched it from home on my 4K TV snuggled with a partner, lol.
Last time I went to the theatre was for the latest avatar, over 3 hours. I still have sciatic nerve pain in my hip from sitting that long. Never going to a theatre again. i say hell no to long movies, and theatres in general.
You may enjoy this SNL song Short-Ass Movies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UKbwz6s6VY
Some movies benefit greatly from having room (runtime) to breathe.
Historical epics like Laurence of Arabia, Ben Hurr, The Ten Commandments and Spartacus immediately come to mind. Their length adds to their "epic" character.
I can think of plenty of films that are overlong and suffer for it too of course. A recent example is the Danish film Godland. There were people literally asleep by the end of that one in the cinema showing I attended. I wished I could have done the same.
Yeah, but if I make a mistake and drink too much water or do not eat before going in, waiting for the ending is just suffering.
I just miss the days where every movie didn't have to be over 2 hours. The 90 minute comedy is a lost art form at this point.
There have always been long movies, but it used to be that there was a purpose, to create an epic. Now we get romantic comedies drawn out to a 2:30 runtime.
Something to check out if you're not busy for the next thousand years: https://www.aslongaspossible.com/
The longest I sat down and watched at a theater was Out 1 at 13-14 hours. Then Satantango at 7.5 hours on 35mm.
If you like long movies that let the story develop, do yourself a favor and watch Sleep, the 1964 classic.
I watch a movie to have a good time! Be that in the form of entertainment, or knowledge-gaining ... simply a good time.
From that point of view it doesn't really matter how long a movie is.
The length of a movie becomes important if it's boring as hell, but then again: I can just stop watching (forced school movies are a time of the, long gone, past for me after all ;D)
My generic review of anything is: it would have been twice as good if it was half as long.
Make the work irreducible.
An intermission like they do in India would be nice for long movies. I hate having to get up to go to the bathroom mid-movie and miss a critical scene.