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In Praise of the Long Movie
- croes 3y agoI 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.
- prepend 3y agoI 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).
- IndySun 3y agoIndeed. I've yet to read "In Praise Of The Long New Yorker Article".
- prepend 3y agoIsn’t that redundant because there are no short New Yorker articles.
- tedunangst 3y agoThere's a whole section of short bites in the print magazine, but never get passed around online.
- pjc50 3y agoYeah, 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_Devil_(1959_film) 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)
- OtomotO 3y agoI 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)
- watwut 3y agoYeah, 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.
- mathgeek 3y agoThis was a solved problem when we had intermissions, but these days the experience is optimized for shorter films with more showtimes.
- RaimundoLS 3y ago[dead]
- smitty1e 3y agoMy generic review of anything is: it would have been twice as good if it was half as long. Make the work irreducible.
- readthenotes1 3y agoIt would have been better shorter
- eru 3y agoIn most cases, yes. But it totally depends on why you need a piece of media (or even art). At the most extreme end, your runtime is fixed. Eg a specific song in a musical might have to last a certain minimum time, so that the crew in the background can quickly change the set. Or think of background music in a game, or even in a bar. They have to be on for as long as it takes, and shouldn't loop too often.
- extrememacaroni 3y agoLong 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.
- vidanay 3y agoI can't remember the titles off-hand, but I remember a couple of movies in the last 30 years actually having an intermission.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sn41 3y agoIf 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 https://youtu.be/bIij-KQ0jYU Part 2 https://youtu.be/uJjqSfdFuUI https://youtu.be/uJjqSfdFuUI Part 3 https://youtu.be/wpKA1meiJzs https://youtu.be/wpKA1meiJzs Part 4 https://youtu.be/nvDMu5e4xzw https://youtu.be/nvDMu5e4xzw
- yamtaddle 3y agoAbel 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.
- jimmySixDOF 3y agoAll 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.
- _a_a_a_ 3y agoUpvoted 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.
- dgroshev 3y agoTo push back a bit on this "it's just empty filler" notion: https://youtu.be/2vfDqDLmjas https://youtu.be/2vfDqDLmjas In short, "boring" bits when used skilfully are important, they help to set the expectations and amplify the subtleties. It's a bit like "dynamic range" for the plot: if there's no change in pace, everything becomes bland and boring. But also I do recommend watching that video essay, it's really good and goes much deeper than I can do in a short reply.
- badpun 3y ago> 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... This. I pretty much stopped watching all new shows made after 2015 or so (with Succession being the exception), as it feels like, during the TV shows gold rush, a lot of not very talented writers and directors got to make their own shows due to huge demand from the studios. In reality, making something many hours long and yet packed with actual interesting content is a Herculean task, so it feels like these untalented people are trying to steal any piece of time they can get, by every mean of stalling possible (sex, violence, "poignant" long shots etc.). It's almost like watching workers paid by the hour, and not by result. Combine that with the fact that most movies and shows nowadays are targetting people who are at most 30 years old [1], and I'm really no longer interested. [1] That's my theory anyway. Young people are the perfect audience - they have more free time and are significantly easier to impress with what is often in reality a poorly done rehash of things that worked in the great movies, shows or books of the past. They're still young enough to experience a given concept for the first time in their life, so they'll be moved by it. They're also significantly more susceptible to fads (don't belive their own taste as strongly, because it's not yet well developed), so it's much easier to manipulate them with marketing, paid reviews etc.
- occoder 3y agoYou may enjoy this SNL song Short-Ass Movies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UKbwz6s6VY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UKbwz6s6VY
- coolandsmartrr 3y agoAside 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/figure18.jpg?w=725 https://www.indiewire.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/figure1... --- 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.
- zabzonk 3y agoi would say any film by tarkovsky, brilliant though they are, could benefit from ruthless editing.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 3y agoAnother 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.
- racktash 3y agoSome 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.
- coldtea 3y agoIf you like long movies that let the story develop, do yourself a favor and watch Sleep, the 1964 classic.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoIt 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.
- CoastalCoder 3y agoIf 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.
- User23 3y agoIndeed. The notion that there is some kind of divide between math, science, and religion is, so far as I can tell, peculiar to a kind of predominantly American form of fundamentalism and, somewhat ironically, its atheist detractors. Catholics, Orthodox, and many Protestant denominations, as well as other world religions, have a rich tradition of studying the natural world objectively. Speaking to the Catholic intellectual tradition since that's the one that I know best, if our understanding of the Bible or Tradition disagrees with our understanding of natural science, then it's not necessarily our understanding of religion that's correct! As an example, while it's not technically dogmatic teaching either way, even though most Catholics used to be young Earth creationists the overwhelming majority now believe in an old Earth including the Popes[1]. [1] https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/proofs-for-the-existence-of-god-in-the-light-of-modern-natural-science-8950 https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/proofs-for-the-exis...
- 3y ago
- Joeboy 3y agoSomething to check out if you're not busy for the next thousand years: https://www.aslongaspossible.com/ https://www.aslongaspossible.com/
- pie_flavor 3y agohttps://archive.is/XWdjQ https://archive.is/XWdjQ
- winddude 3y agoLast 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.
- yboris 3y agoHow about long movies at home?
- lostgame 3y agoObviously that's massively different. We can sit up, pause, move around, snuggle with a lover, we can just run and take a piss if we need without worrying about missing a critical scene, or watch it in two parts if we're feeling tired and want to catch the rest the next day. My partner and I are also not out a combined $50 and we got to share a bottle of wine at home while we watch the movie on my 4K TV. No transit, either. We can just roll over and pass out if we want. Cinema has a problem if it continues to stubbornly refuse to implement intermissions in films 2:30+. I'm just so over it.
- wahnfrieden 3y agoThe longest I sat down and watched at a theater was Out 1 at 13-14 hours. Then Satantango at 7.5 hours on 35mm.
- BryantD 3y agoIf I ever watch Satantango, I want it to be in a theater. I have the attention span for it but it’ll help if I can’t dig my phone out of my pocket. (Yeah, yeah, will power.)
- wahnfrieden 3y agoSatantango I’d seen after a couple hours sleep after a going away party. It’s great and definitely benefits from the detail of 35mm film. I saw Turin Horse three times in theaters (NYFF then its release) not to mention the 4-5 times on video, and while both are rewarding the theater is best if the audience is fine and it’s actually a good projection.
- ramesh31 3y agoI 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.
- pjc50 3y agoRegular comedy or rom-com seems to be kind of missing at the moment, doesn't it? Apart from straight-to-Hallmark low quality material.
- Arrath 3y agoThey really are. A few articles examining the "Death of the mid budget movie" have touched on it. I miss solid, theatrically released comedies. I recently watched Game Night (2018) which was hilarious, before that I'm reaching back to Tropic Thunder and Forgetting Sarah Marshall (both 2008 IIRC). I'm sure there are more, but it feels as if they've really fallen off.
- ubermonkey 3y agoIt'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.
- Avshalom 3y agoHe's got one of the best editors in the business https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thelma_Schoonmaker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thelma_Schoonmaker
- rurban 3y agoDoesn't help when esp. his editing sucks. You can see that easily when he does remakes, and compare them. Internal Affairs vs Departed. Either the editor is thinking the audience is too stupid, do they have to overexplain everything, or the editor is too stupid, or the director is too stupid. The third option being the most likely. And not even Asian directors are the best with bold cuts, African movies treating their audiences as the most clever. There's no need at all for lengthy introductions so that Aunty Karen will get it. Apparently Africans get it better than Asians, and esp. Americans. Internal Affairs run 30m longer, even with extensive backstory cuts. Unfortunately I wrote my critic in German only, https://letterboxd.com/rurban/film/the-departed/ https://letterboxd.com/rurban/film/the-departed/
- ubermonkey 3y ago<whoosh>
- nchohan 3y agoAn 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.
- AlbertCory 3y ago"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.
- egypturnash 3y agoAnything 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".
- valarauko 3y agoThankfully, 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.
- egypturnash 3y agoMy mother took me to a lot of musicals when I was a kid and this is a pretty common way for them to lead into an intermission, as well. Except of course after that big cliffhanger musical number, the curtains drop, the house lights come up, and the bathroom lines begin.
- vivegi 3y agoThat is right. Most Indian regional language and Bollywood Hindi films (even the modern ones) run around 2h30m to 2h40m. The older films were even longer. RRR, the Indian film that captured a lot of viewership around the globe had a runtime of 3h2m. Most screenwriters and filmmakers in India design around the Interval-block to place a major plot-point just before the interval card is shown. It is funny that recent Hollywood movies don't come with that. And even when a film is 2h+ long. Indian movie theatres just forcibly introduce a break in Hollywood films so that they can send people to the concession stands and restrooms. Sometimes, this happens mid-dialogue it is funny (and irritating at times).
- valarauko 3y ago> Indian movie theatres just forcibly introduce a break in Hollywood films so that they can send people to the concession stands and restrooms. Is this still the case? It's been probably over 10 years since I saw a movie in an Indian theater, so my memory is hazy.
- lostgame 3y agoIf 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.
- lostgame 3y agoFuture 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.