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Film students who can no longer sit through films
https://archive.md/GFWzW https://archive.md/GFWzW
- lysace 9mo agoFrom a programmer perspective: (Old man yelling at the sky.) It's been this exponential progress in distraction (internet, social networks, weaponizing human psychology to make money). I got into programming in the late 80s/early 90s. If I were a teenager today, I'm not sure I would have the willpower to suffer through enough focused boredom to really learn.
- thefz 9mo agoMaybe try presenting them 15 seconds at a time, in portrait mode with bouncy subtitles.
- s5300 9mo ago[dead]
- _m_p 9mo agoArt isn't for everybody.
- pier25 9mo agoIndeed. But if film is not for you maybe don't study film?
- _m_p 9mo agoTechnically they aren't studying film! The article notes that the professors won't outright fail them, so these students just getting a degree without doing any work. Which in turn makes the degree credential a useless signal.
- pier25 9mo agoI mean... > Professors are now finding that they can’t even get film students—film students—to sit through movies.
- nizbit 9mo agoBring back the 90 minute movies!
- jamestimmins 9mo agoJonathan Haidt recently made the point on Ezra Klein's podcast that while adults can take a break from phones and reset their attention/hormones in a couple of weeks, we don't know what impact similar addiction has on a developing mind. It's possible the addiction sets in much deeper. I'm sympathetic to folks who grew up shaped by this. Not for nothing, but The Conversation also has a compelling start/end, but has a long, arguably slow, boring middle. So it's like being forced into withdrawal on hard mode.
- rjh29 9mo agoI think that's true. Alcohol addiction modifies the brain and it can take over a year to recover dopamine sensitivity, focus, mood, cognitive ability. It's called PAWS (post acute withdrawal syndrome). Given TikTok etc. has a similar profile of long usage over a long period, I'd also expect it to take a long time to fully recover from.
- prhn 9mo agoI don't dispute the shortening of attentions spans, which seems to be directly related to new forms of entertainment young people consume. However. Films across the generations are very different in terms of how they lay out a narrative. Watch any film before 1980 and you'll start to see a pattern that the pacing and evolution of the narrative is generally very, very slow. Art is highly contextualized by the period it's created in. I don't really think it's fair to expect people to appreciate art when it's taken completely out of its context. Lawrence of Arabia, for example. What a brilliant, brilliant film. Beautiful, influential, impressively produced. And really, really boring and slow a lot of the time. If I were a film professor today, hell even 20 years ago, I would not expect a modern film student to sit through that whole thing. I think it's my job as a professor to understand the context of the period, highlight the influential/important scenes, and get students to focus on those instead of having to watch 4 hours of slowly paced film making and possibly miss the important stuff.
- viccis 9mo ago>And really, really boring and slow a lot of the time. At no point was it "boring"
- Insanity 9mo agoI guess that might be a modern interpretation. But I do disagree as well. I actually prefer older films because of the pacing, and fortunately live close enough to the TIFF cinema that I can see such films every other week.
- pier25 9mo agoThe pacing is irrelevant in this context. As a student the main point of watching these movies is not entertainment. Although I will say it's pretty amazing that someone that supposedly has an interest in film would not be able to watch The Conversation or an even slower film like 2001.
- blindriver 9mo agoNo you're wrong. It's not about the era. Matt Damon talked about this on the Joe Rogan podcast recently. He was asked by Netflix to create a big action sequence in the first 5 mins so that people on their phones would get hooked into watching the entire movie. He was also asked to mention the plot of the movie several times throughout the movie because people on their phones will tend to miss plot details and it helped keep them engaged. This is not about how movies are paced, it's about the way phones have changed attention spans.
- 99_00 9mo agoThe ability to focus is not decreasing. When studies are published talking about “attention span” decreasing they mean the amount of time people spend paying attention to one thing. They don’t mean people’s capacity for attention is decreasing. I’m a bit surprised to see this myth is still around, but looking at the source maybe I shouldn’t be
- polski-g 9mo agoThen just don't pass them? Like of someone couldn't do calculus, you shouldn't give them credit for Calc 101.
- _m_p 9mo agoThey're customers.
- Kon5ole 9mo agoWe used to read books for 12+ hours, then we started watching films.
- esafak 9mo agoMy solution would be to filter them out: why are they occupying the seats of students who actually like and watch movies? Film school is wasted on the TikTok crowd.
- drewda 9mo agoFrom the same magazine that also recently published a piece headlined "The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books" I do have a print subscription to The Atlantic and appreciate some of their coverage, but it's embarrassing how much they're always on the lookout for upper-middle-class panics to milk...
- philipallstar 9mo agoThis isn't valid criticism. Treat the article as just its own thing, regardless of who published it.
- drewda 9mo agoHere's another recent example: ‘A Recipe for Idiocracy’: What happens when even college students can’t do math anymore? (The Atlantic, Nov. 2025)
- labrador 9mo agoMy take is that with the modern availability of so many high quality films, we (I) no longer have patience to sit through a mediocre films. the opportunity cost is too high.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- rurban 9mo agoIf they cannot sit through essentials, like The Conservation, Jules and Jim or Jeanne Dielman, just fail them. For further filtering let's add Andrei Rublev, and the classes will better. We always filtered out 80% of our students in the first year to get healthy classes and get any work done
- DamianLewis 9mo ago[dead]
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- amelius 9mo ago[flagged]
- incognito124 9mo agoJust build a tiny pedro raccoon and minecraft jumping scenes with the movie and they're good to go
- recursivedoubts 9mo agoOK, phones & social media are obviously dangerously addictive. Now what?
- rabf 9mo agoInstall Davinci Resolve on your phone.
- tartoran 9mo agoGet off them. Many started to already.
- sodapopcan 9mo agoI'm just about one month into a flip phone. I still spend way too much time on my laptop when I'm home (and I'm home a lot) but I'm not missing my iPhone at all. When I am out, though, it's nice not having the option to look at the internet. Instead I pet my dog, talk to people, or just look around and think like I used to all those years ago.
- tartoran 9mo agoQuestion, how do you fare with a flip phone and SPAM SMS/text messages? Smart phones can at least contain them, silence them, mark them as junk etc..
- sodapopcan 9mo agoI'm actually a bit worried that I am not getting some texts in general so need to investigate that. But that's a good question... so far I have gotten no spam texts but ya. Good question! I'll report back if I figure it out.
- mym1990 9mo agoAbout as useful as telling a heroine addict to get off heroine, except that screen addiction is much more subtle in the harmful effects, but is incredibly corrosive over time. Almost all tech products in the world are pushing for more and more screentime, there is really not much regulation in sight, in the US at least(go Australia!). The best hope is that one day an Ozempic for screen time comes out!
- nottorp 9mo agoOn a tangent, maybe we can save reading by doing more flash fiction?
- semilin 9mo agoShort stories. At my high school (from which I graduated a few years ago) practically no one read anything assigned. Yet I observed in a short story class I took that at least the majority of students consistently read the stories, and this led to insightful discussions. High value ideas that are quick to absorb but slow to understand are a better avenue to appreciating long-form literature.
- bloqs 9mo agoJust needs to be broken down into series of scrollable short format clips with different dramatic snippets of distorted music over each one
- brycewray 9mo agoAnd every line of dialog shown, no more than five words at a time, in all-caps and bold-faced yellow superimposed text in a font that resembles a comic book sound effect.
- philipallstar 9mo agoAnd mirrored to avoid copyright detection.
- bitwize 9mo agoDon't forget Subway Surfers along the sides!
- actionfromafar 9mo agoWith someone peeling a carrot on half of the screen.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
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- D13Fd 9mo agoAnd an outrage-inducing political bent.
- philipallstar 9mo ago> 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.
- Der_Einzige 9mo agoTeachers/Professors are some of the biggest oppressors in society. They directly decide who gets to be poor and who gets to be wealthy. Every negative grade they give is robbery of food out of your children's mouth. There's a reason they get their backs against the walls first during revolutions. The book that coined the term "Meritocracy" was extremely critical of the concept for a reason. It is bad to try to have one and good to destroy the concept. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- crazygringo 9mo agoThey literally are customers. They pay money in exchange for an education and a degree. You start failing too many students, it becomes a risky place to enroll, enrollment drops, they can't cover their expenses, and they close. Edit: I'm not defending this, just explaining it. It's inevitable under a private education system, unless you literally legislate and enforce grading on a curve within all private institutions, which doesn't seem to be a popular idea among voters in free democracies either.
- appreciatorBus 9mo agoYes.
- yladiz 9mo agoThey are paying for the education, but not for the degree, and they’re not paying to get a passing grade even if they do poorly. I wouldn’t necessarily agree that we should just fail the students, clearly something is going on if the professor has to use a curve unexpectedly, but we shouldn’t just accept this as okay simply because they are paying.
- actionfromafar 9mo agoThis actually made me a little angry, to my surprise. :-D I thought film student was almost like a holy calling, an opportunity that passed me by. Clearly, it's just the equivalent to another biz management course to some of these students.
- mmooss 9mo agoIf you have that passion, you should study film - it's never too late, and your passion will take you much further than the people just taking courses. You won't regret it. It's like people in IT who went to some technical degree factory and got a certification, compared to those who took apart their parent's computer, figured out how to install Linux, hacked their own drivers and apps, etc.
- rwc 9mo ago"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.
- pier25 9mo agoI love movies but in the last 5-6 years I've only been 3 times to the theater. Dune 1, Dune 2, and Oppenheimer. Theaters in my area couldn't care less about image and sound quality. Audiences don't seem to care at all about movies. Most are either on their phones or talking. I'm not paying exorbitant prices for such sub par experience. I'd rather watch the movie at home with 4K DV on an OLED display and an Atmos setup.
- sevenseacat 9mo agoI can't even remember the last time I went to the movies. It might have been John Wick 2 or 3.
- bluescrn 9mo agoThe 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)
- azinman2 9mo agoThis is so tragic. How are these folks going to lead the world when they cannot pay attention to anything?
- cat-snatcher 9mo ago30 seconds at a time
- p1esk 9mo agoDid kids pay attention 100 years ago?
- PeterStuer 9mo agoIf they did not they would lose some digits or limbs working unsafe machinery etc.
- bdcp 9mo agoKids no, students yes?
- SkyeCA 9mo agoJust let AI run the world. It quite literally can't do any worse than our existing leaders.
- jfengel 9mo agoNot sure if you're being sarcastic. A lot of the people currently running the world seem to have poor attention spans as well. Others have great attention spans, and I wish they'd pay attention to something different. I'm not scared of the kids today running the world differently. Maybe it'll suck but I don't think the way it's running now is any great shakes, either.
- azinman2 9mo agoI’m not being sarcastic. Running the world is more than just who is president… it’s who your doctors are, your electrical repairmen, your nannies, etc. It’s not like this is the only example of where the younger generation is different… we see reports everywhere that college students cannot read full sentences anymore. When you have such a generational lag (independent of outliers), it drags all of society down.
- bogdart 9mo agoIf the film students are not able to sit through a film, they just are needed to be kicked out, that's it.
- treelover 9mo agoIs 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.
- _m_p 9mo ago"Information density" is not what works of art provide.
- pier25 9mo agoThat's a way of saying that they need constant stimulation which is exactly an inability to focus or a loss of attention span.
- l33tbro 9mo agoWhat'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.
- mvdtnz 9mo ago> is the 2-hour feature film simply an outdated format for the current generation? Movies are getting longer, not shorter. I wish we could go back to the 2 hour feature.
- appreciatorBus 9mo ago[flagged]
- dangus 9mo agoI do sometimes think about slow burn movies and how they are hard to find outside of Oscar bait type of pictures. Just looking at kids movies, something like My Neighbor Totoro has many scenes involving ambient sound with no dialog or background music, and it’s a major contrast compared to today’s 3D dopamine festivals. On the other hand, that might just be survivorship bias. I’m cherry picking the best kids movie of its decade and comparing it to Boss Baby 2. Finally, I’d also say my default read of articles like this are that they’re probably idle “the kids these days are bad” concern bait. A professor complaining that his students won’t do their homework is not new and it’s not news. It is a statistical certainty. Avatar 3 is making a billion dollars on people willing to sit through a 2.5 hour movie.
- ksymph 9mo agoWhy would someone study film if they're not interested in it? People have been bored by movies nearly as long as movies have existed; but historically I don't think those people would go into college to study it. What changed? It's not like there's a lot of money in film, so I struggle to understand the motivations there.
- sowbug 9mo ago"... go into college ..." makes it sound like more of an active decision than it is for many students who treat it as four more years of high school. It's not surprising that such students might pick a major that sounds more fun (movies!!) than subjects they already find tedious (more math, more history, more foreign language). I wish I'd taken a year off after high school to get a job and at least pretend to earn a living. I wonder whether I might have embraced college more if I had.
- taude 9mo agoCareer prospects with better odds becoming a Hollywood film director than a Junior Developer in software in the age of AI? ;). (I joke, I joke.)
- dunham 9mo agoWhen 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.
- tdeck 9mo agoI've never heard of needing a minor. Was that a requirement at your school?
- bronlund 9mo agoThere 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.
- alecco 9mo agoMultiple teachers in my family report there is an attention crisis. And worse, the kids are addicted to their screens and even show signs of withdrawal in class. One case required professional intervention and the parents didn't seem bothered about it.
- bronlund 9mo agoJust because the kids aren’t paying attention to the teachers, doesn’t mean they are having problem focusing. They are probably learning more from their screens, than from the teachers. When the only book in town was the bible and the only guy who had it was the priest, it made sense to have him front and center giving out all the answers. This is not the reality anymore and now kids can probably learn better by themselves. You should look into the work of Sugata Mitra.
- pier25 9mo agoDrug addicts can enjoy drugs for hours and hours /s
- bronlund 9mo agoThey can make movies more enjoyable too! I think you are on to something :)
- bccdee 9mo agoBeing 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.
- crazygringo 9mo agoCounterpoint from the article: > A handful of professors told me they hadn’t noticed any change. Some students have always found old movies to be slow, Lynn Spigel, a professor of screen cultures at Northwestern University, told me. “But the ones who are really dedicated to learning film always were into it, and they still are.” The article doesn't actually give any evidence attention spans are shortened. Many of the movies you study in film school are genuinely excruciatingly slow and boring, unless you're hyper-motivated. Before mobile phones, you didn't have any choice but to sit through it. Now you have a choice. I suspect that film students 30 years ago, despite having a "full attention span", would also have been entertaining themselves on phones if they'd had them. I love movies. But I also make liberal use of 2x speed and +5s during interminably long suspense sequences that are literally just someone walking through a dark environment while spooky music plays. It's not that I suffer from a short attention span, it's that there's nothing to pay attention to. There's no virtue in suffering through boredom.
- WalterBright 9mo agoOnce you know about "Save The Cat!" it becomes boring to watch a movie that follows the formula. I noticed even back in the 80s that too many movies ended in the "chase through the darkened warehouse". The movie will be doing fine, until somehow the hero and villain wind up in a dark, abandoned warehouse, ship, factory, whatever. Then they have a long, drawn out fight. Then the bad guy gets killed. Movie over? Nope. The bad guy rises from the dead and has to be killed again. Sometimes even a third time. Then there are movies with the party of 10 people or so. The point is to kill them off one by one, each in a gruesomely different way, until the star is the only one left. Movies also telegraph who in the party is going to die next. It's the person who reflects on something innocuous, like "isn't it nice to hear the birds singing!". Dead meat, every time. The only interesting thing to do with these movies is make bets on the order of the deaths. "Game of Thrones" was interesting because it did not follow any formula I could discern, except for the last two seasons.
- mmooss 9mo agoI try not to think too much in those circumstances. It's often better not to know, not to notice, though it's not always possible. People like genre and formula; it's not necessarily a negative - pop songs follow structures and formulas over and over. Also, creative artists can innovate by varying those structures and playing with expectations that don't exist in less formulaic creations. There is plenty of non-formulaic film (and other arts) if you want it? I'm sure you must know that.
- semilin 9mo agoIf 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.
- illiac786 9mo agoVery little people really care about a hobby. The ones that do are the most visible but the huge mass just isn’t passionate.
- rishabhaiover 9mo ago> When one has faith that sustained attention might hold more value than that gained by interruption, they tend to prioritize the former. I suspect that attention is naturally tuned to work towards genuine interests which may be orthogonal to conventional value producing tasks
- deadbabe 9mo agoThese “film students” are like the people who take computer science just because they like playing video games. Most of their idea of film is putting together little reels and TikToks. “Absolute Cinema” type stuff. They don’t actually care about movies and the art.
- perching_aix 9mo ago> But the article points out that the students here don't even watch movies themselves -- "students have struggled to name any film" they recently watched. Why are these people even studying film? The inattention is clearly caused by disinterest. There's a saying around here that roughly goes: few things are as successful in killing one's interest in something as pursuing a formal education about it. Being innately interested in something is one thing, but then being in an environment when that is now a hard expectation is another. It's like the difference between wanting to draw something and being forced to draw something. Entirely different playing fields.
- Der_Einzige 9mo agoHow do I sqaure this circle with that the biggest films in the last two decades have been Avatar, Avatar: The Way of Water, and Avatar: Fire and Ash 2h 42m, 3 hours 12 minutes, and 3 hours 15 minutes. All 3 are WAY too long and Way of Water in particular felt like it was 4+ hours subjectively. Yet, they're literally the biggest films EVER by gross. So seems the general public has longer attention spans than film students. This isn't the first time that lay people are objectively better/smarter than so-called "professionals" in a field.
- bccdee 9mo agoThese 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.
- Der_Einzige 9mo agoEveryone I know who critiques the length of these films agrees we’d literally rather watch an art film like stalker instead of these absolute meandering snooze fests. 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.
- lexiathan 9mo agoIn 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.
- mmooss 9mo agoThe prior generation of film students grew up the same way, and the one before that. Remember westerns, for example? If you're a film student, presumably you are interested in the art and technique, and then films like "Man with a Movie Camera" are fascinating and beautiful. Similarly, Vim does not appeal to a public accustomed to simple apps, no learning curve, gamification, and lots of graphics; but computer professionals see it as a thing of beauty.
- ttoinou 9mo agoYeah but you have to watch Man with a Movie Camera with a good soundtrack like The Cinematic Orchestra one. Then it becomes the best non verbal movie ever.
- lexiathan 9mo agoI'll add it to my list!
- Gimpei 9mo agoI took a bunch of film classes in college and what they’re not mentioning is that sometimes the films bring assigned are crazy boring. I once had to watch an hour of footage shot from a camera in an outdoor elevator as it went up and down. One hour. The professor said it was the perfect summation of everything he’d been discussing over the term. I swear I’m not joking.
- rabf 9mo agoPerhaps as a film student you were meant to be looking at the composition, the shot structures, the color grading, the use of sound? The film may have been boring in its message or story but still a technical masterpiece?
- endominus 9mo agoWhy did the author feel the need to throw in a spoiler for the end of The Conversation in the last paragraph of the article? That seems contradictory to the point of everything else she wrote and disrespectful to both the audience and the film.
- sowbug 9mo agoShe put it at the end of the article. If her premise is correct, it will remain safely unread.
- bccdee 9mo agoThe Conversation came out in 1974, 52 years ago. By any reasonable metric, the statute of limitations on spoilers has long ago elapsed. If we can't even mention that Rosebud is a sled without some sort of spoiler banner, I think we're letting our preciousness about spoilers get in the way of actually discussing film.
- metabagel 9mo agoIf you’re really studying film, there is a lot to pay attention to in every scene. If you’re just watching films to be entertained, then yes, older movies have a slower pace and can sometimes be boring. I think a film student would often be asking themselves why it was shot that way and what they might do differently.
- mmooss 9mo agoOften media forms make sense in their original context and make less sense the more the current context differs. In classical music orchestras, for example, many identical instruments play simultaneously, unlike in jazz or blues/folk/rock/pop. IMHO that makes more sense in a context without amplification, without few sounds are that loud (making it more special and dramatic), and in an industrial society where the common solution is lots of workers performing identical tasks. We can also think of media forms as technologies and see them similarly. For video the context is shifting: As an hypothesis, the length of the media could be viewed as ROI for the required commitment. In the context where watching a film required going to a theater, 30 seconds or 30 minutes would be poor ROI - you plan, travel, give up everything else you're doing, pay ... you'd be unhappy if it was over in 30 minutes. In a context where the commitment is pulling your phone from your pocket and tapping it a few times, 30 seconds can be fine and you usually wouldn't want stand there for 2 hours. Each form has advantages and disadvantages; I think it's a normal but clear error to say what came first, what we're more familiar with, is better. We do and will lose things with change, but we'll gain others. We don't lose them completely - there are still classical orchestras though no more riots over a premiere. But the energy of innovation is not in classical music, jazz or rock - people listen to the old stuff mostly - and maybe less in film. I expect that many of the young, innovative geniuses who in the past would have made classical music or jazz or rock, or written novels, are now making computer games - they are embracing the newish frontier, and the exciting thing of their youth. So far, film seems to coexist pretty well; there seems to be plenty of creative energy on the high end, but we'll see. What about small independent films? What about film schools?
- vitaelabitur 9mo agoWe traded books for films, and now films for short videos, always moving towards what is easier to enjoy. Quite a while ago, books became a taste that needs to be patiently acquired. Someone starting to read today is more likely to develop the taste by gradually easing into books that demand more and more. Say maybe Huxley -> Camus -> Wilde -> Dostoevsky. Now that short clips are here, the same has happened to films. The uninitiated need to sit through Scorsese, Hitchcock, Wilder, Kubrick, Altman before attempting Fellini, Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Ozu, Resnais. And by the way, someone who is naturally inclined to love films (or books) won't be affected, even today. Am I wrong? The way they are described here, I would crush these film students.
- jfengel 9mo agoIt helped that books were all we had. I probably would have preferred little snippets of dopamine, too. I'm kinda glad I walked across campus glued to a book. But it was the same low tolerance for boredom that people show today.
- lalalandland 9mo agoI think TV series are bigger than films now. They have established characters and story line spanned over several shorter episodes with cliffhangers and recaps etc. Once you get into a series you follow it for several seasons. It's a preferred way to tell stories. I usually prefer films over TV series because I find just these tropes tiring. I find TV series have quite inefficient story telling and spend most of its time trying to get me hooked to watch the next episode.