Film, Illusion & Spectatorship, Part 5: “I want a thrill a minute…or better yet every 2.5 seconds.”

In Part 1, we discussed how the slickness of Hollywood movies turns audiences off to movies with ambiguous endings.

In Part 2, we explored how audiences don’t like it when movies remind them that they are fake.

In Part 3, we examined how audiences react when either the acting style or the character depictions fall too far outside of the norm.

In Part 4, we looked at how non-realistic characters and situations can actually be enjoyable.

And now, finally, in Part 5, we explore the connection between speed and forgetting and slowness and depth.

“There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.”
– Milan Kundera, Slowness

When I go to the movies, I often come away feeling like I haven’t had a chance to actually see anything, an odd sensation to experience with a visual art form.  Sometimes it’s due to hand-held camera work, which can convey the skittishness of a nervous person looking around wildly to avoid eye contact.  But it can also be attributed to shot length.

In 1903 the average shot length was 35.6 seconds; by 2007, the average shot length was 2.5 seconds.  Slick, fast films keep the audience’s attention easily, because if they look away, even for a second, they’ll miss something.  Literally.  There’s no time for reflection, no room for contemplation.  You must watch in order to keep up.  And at the end of the movie, you can easily say that you saw everything but learned nothing.

Even if an emotion or an idea catches your attention in a rapidly cut film, there is no time to savour it or think about what it might mean and, due to the insistence on narrative closure, you probably won’t remember to think about it afterwards.  Everything is thus forgettable – almost like a dream: boom, flash, it’s gone.  Further, the insistence on short shot lengths makes it impossible to explore certain emotional territory: loneliness, tedium, sadness, desire, nostalgia, etc – these are emotions that require longer takes.

Consider, for instance, the films of Tsai Ming Liang.  He tends to make films about lonely alienated people.  Thus, many of his shots are long and feature people doing banal, sometimes tedious things.  Why?  Not because he’s trying to entertain you, but rather to get you to think about the nature of loneliness – how time seems endless and ultimately empty to those who have no one to share it with.

I particularly enjoy how he achieved this sense of loneliness among movie patrons in his film Good-Bye Dragon Inn.

Some, of course, would argue that they don’t go to the cinema to think about the more unpleasant feelings associated with being alive but, instead, to be entertained.  I like to be entertained just as much as anyone else; however, I also think that film can offer more than entertainment. I even think film can be both entertaining and thought-provoking at the same time.

When I was in college my hero was Marguerite Duras.  I liked her simplicity and her directness.  She wrote about desire and suffering.  Her characters, much like Tsai Ming Liang’s characters, were lonely and looking to find a connection with others.  She once wrote that while making one of her films, Natalie Granger (I think), she insisted on filming one of the female characters doing the dishes for several minutes.  Several minutes of a woman’s hands doing women’s work.  Entertaining?  No.  So why put your audience through such a thing?  Because that was how many women spent their time, their whole lives, in fact.  Tediously.  There’s no other way to express it than to show it, to make the audience feel it and experience it for themselves.

Tarkovsky is another filmmaker who relishes in the long, contemplative take.  The camera lingers, moves over things, and stops to allow the audience to look, to think, to contemplate.  Consider this scene from The Mirror (my favorite Tarkovsky film).  You may not know what’s going on, but he gives you ample time to figure it out.  And even if you don’t “get it” right away, you can certainly feel it.  The slowness of the scene evokes a sense of childish wonder and curiosity mixed with a deep sense of sadness and loss that quick cutting could never evoke.

Shot length is something I struggled with in both Snow Bunny and Sound Sleeper. Both films are about family life, which for me, has always been about tedium and entrapment.    So if I want to convey these things to the audience, how can I do it without boring them, especially when they’ve been fed a steady diet of rapid-fire cuts?

I recently hacked two minutes off Sound Sleeper.  Initially we showed a mother making and serving breakfast several mornings in a row.  You saw her frying eggs, browning sausage, pouring cereal, toasting waffles.  Mundane, routine activities that many mothers know well.  By cutting out some of the breakfast prep footage, I know that it’s more palatable to audiences, more entertaining.  But what did we lose?  The monotony of the mother’s morning chore is referenced but not experienced, which, to me, means that the overall theme might not be be fully developed or fully understood.  But I also understand that people won’t watch something at all if they think it’s boring… so it all comes down to balance.

As a filmmaker, I plan to continue exploring how to balance showing the tedium or less “fun” aspects of life with keeping the audience entertained.  And somewhere, probably not too far away, is another filmmaker trying to figure out how to cut the 2.5 second shot average to 2.25.  For entertainment’s sake.