It is a little bit funny that a few days after I bitch about something―on the way to bitching about something else―there's an Unherd article about it. Namely, how so many movies today just run on forever.
Muriel Zagha may be right that studios wanting to give audiences added value as a way of coaxing them back to the theaters. Of course the problem is that it could very easily have the opposite effect. In their minds, I think most cinemagoers still think of it as a good way to spend a couple of hours. If the whole thing counting transportation runs into four or even five hours, that's a lot of your day that's now gone, which can be a frustrating experience.
One might blame James Cameron for starting this. His Titanic ran for three hours and a quarter and made zillions. Of course it wasn't the first long movie to become a hit. But there were doubters. In the months before it was released it became notorious for running way over budget and generally being out of control. Then it proved the doubters wrong. Now everyone wants to be James Cameron. It sometimes works out for them in a commercial sense, sometimes not, but it's led a lot of them astray.
Anyway, it's encouraging to hear that shorter screen classics are proving popular at Picturehouse cinemas. Hopefully that trend will spread to the other side of the Atlantic.
2 comments:
That's called synchronicity.
Although I haven't watched any of those outrageously long films that last 5 hours and more at a sitting, I have seen some long movies I enjoyed: The Seven Samurai, Gone With the Wind, Once Upon a Time in America and others (can't leave out The Lord of the Rings, can I?
Then there are the long ones I didn't enjoy at all - The Longest Day (painful enough to feel like actual combat) comes to mind as does Barry Linden (like watching paint dry).
Some movies make time fly and others don't (I agree it's largely a matter of personal taste). However, the problem we're discussing isn't whether any of those movies were better or worse for their length but whether or not it was a good story told well.
Rather than making a film overly long simply because you can't figure out how to end it or in order to see how much the short attention span audience will tolerate, I have another idea. Why not break up the experience of going to the movies as they used to do in the old days?
Begin with a cartoon; follow it with one of those Pathe newsreels; then show a
short cliffhanger, an irresistable guarantee of a return audience; then you can show the main feature that needn't be that long at all.
With one breath, with one flow, you will know...synchronicity. (Sting was familiar with Jung).
The Seven Samurai and the others sort of demand an epic scale. At the very least, the directors knew that they would be asking more attention from the audience than they usually would have gotten. As it happens, they were successful in getting it. It's very different when filmmakers are delivering barely edited messes.
I haven't seen The Longest Day but it does sound like a project that could become very unwieldy. Barry Lyndon is somewhat notorious. Kubrick did better with The Shining, which was long but nailed the atmosphere.
It does come down to the story, and if you've got a handle on the story you want to tell.
The all-in-one movie experience was a mainstay of the Depression. If things are getting precarious again, it's an idea whose time might have just come (again.)
It's always amazed me how much affection those Pathe newsreels got. Welles even did a mockup of one at the start of Citizen Kane. News of the world was actually something the audience looked forward to seeing, maybe because there wasn't a glut of it.
Post a Comment