Are films getting longer?

Dune was too short, needed to be 4 hours long

OK
OK
On the contrary, when you adjust the pitch on a turntable you stretch the notes a little bit too. With modern video software, however, the pitch is kept the same and only the rate of play is accelerated. In this sense, video software does less violence to fidelity of sound reproduction.
You seem to think that the "true" artwork is experiential. It's how you feel that matters.

If so, we might see the mechanism of the experience to be irrelevant so long as we can create the same emotional/perceptual state with drugs or meditation or perhaps we might use neurolink to active a sequence of qualitative states in a particular (start with a feeling of curiosity, the perception of being at the start of a great journey, next fade into a sense of threat and opportunity and awe presented by the disclosure of the premise/blockage...). If the artwork is nothing but a sequence of perceptual states, we would get closer to the artist's intention by bypassing the inconsistent mechanism of playing those notes of perception/emotion/qualia (a medium) and just playing the right notes in your brain (e.g,. with Musk's neurolink).

On the other hand, if the work of art is an abstract object with definitive qualities (and you do seem to be particular about not monkeying about with the objective features for fear of altering the experience that follows), we can observe that object without having to perceive it exactly the same way every time we observe it.

And indeed, our perceptions of artworks change with different viewings, even "pure" viewings (e.g., intended setting, intended medium, intended rate of speed) vary considerably. A horror film will sometimes strike us as being comedic. A comedy intended to cheer us up can make us sad. That the artwork tries to make us "feel" a certain way is no guarantee that we will have precisely the phenomenological "trip" that was intended.

The only thing which is consistent from viewing to viewing is the artwork itself. This is why we can return to it to re-experience it (somewhat differently), to consider what the artwork attempts to say and do (without necessarily agreeing with the intended message or having the intended emotional experience -- it is possible, for example, to appreciate a good joke without laughing).

Two points here.

First and again, I maintain that at 1.1 to 1.2 times speed your brain wraps itself around the playback, relativizing the experience, leaving it much the same experience. I maintain that you can substantively experience the film as well as can be hoped (because none of us has precisely the same experience of anything) with modest speed-shifting. If you have lightly tinted glasses or adequate hearing aids you may substantively "see" the same painting or "hear" the same symphony. Speed is, to a point, relative in our experience of it.

Second, and as we've agreed, the objective features of the artwork are not lost. The objective feature of "duration" (in time) is altered in an accelerated playback, however, since it is (apparently) not the objective features that matter to you, but that to which the features point (that which is referenced), this doesn't really matter so long as we can intersubjectively "get" what it is that the original length/speed of the film was trying to say/do: "Ah, we sat quietly with protag on that bench for five minutes because the filmmaker wanted us to feel the anxiety of waiting for that bus." Again, we can get a joke without laughing at a joke. Indeed, we can recognize that a joke is of good quality even if the spell did not have the desired result (a spontaneous laugh).

There are nuances of difference, sure. But here is my challenge to you. How great is this "violence" in terms of nuance? Is it, for example, as great as watching Lawrence of Arabia on an IPhone than on a giant screen projecting a 70mm print? Is it as great as the violence done by cropping and pen-and-scan to make film fit in 4x3? Is it as great as the violence of the many "cuts" of popular films that are for sale? And which cut is the "real" cut?

To the point, if the nuance of upping the speed a bit does less violence than other interventions which you to enter into filmic conversations to protest "Not the real artwork!" then you are inconsistent and should either

1. Puritanically tell off everyone who reveals they did not have an ideally intended viewing of an artwork, Or....
   
2. Cut me a break for only going 5 MPH over the speed limit. Come on, officer! Everyone is driving 60!

The horns of a dilemma confront you.
So, you're going to go the puritanical route?
Here is my next challenge. If the variability in "experience" (Let's bracket for now the controversial question of whether the artwork is merely sort of experience in your head. Rene Wellek is waiting in the wings for this one.) is comparable or less than the variability of the idiosyncratic noise brought by the average viewer (e.g., their prejudices, tummy ache, recent break up, lottery win, knowledge of how police work is actually conducted) then we should accept the acceleration as inconsequential noise that does not radically change the viewing experience.
Well, you may have the attention span of a goldfish, but the long-term memory of an elephant given your recollection of our original conversation. I am not sure if I should pity the former or envy the latter.
I am sure you still "get it" just fine and see more than an average viewer on their good day.
I've noticed that where an when you read a book can have an impact. Also, there is the old chestnut about listening to a particular album on vacation on repeat so that you may conjure the memory of that experience later on a re-listen.

We are none of us pure, perfect, transparent receptors for artworks. We are various, promiscuous, plastic, translucent, and interactive participants. This is why artworks can stay the same while experience of it varies. Pinning our hopes to a pure experience of the thing is a fools hope which would leave us adrift in a universe of an infinite number of artworks, each corresponding to a particular experience of it. If so, the aesthetic relativists really would have us beat, wouldn't they? And if so, what would the point of our conversations be as we are never talking about the same thing?

Are you sure you can't be talked down from the experiential ledge?
No worries. I was not trying to call you out. I only vaguely remember the original exchange and not the players.



As you know, I love these little debates, and if I am ever changed by conversation, that is sometimes a benefit, right?

In terms of relatively common experience, I am only asking for a little bit of leeway with speed. Can't you just let me off with a warning for 1.2x speed? Isn't it basically the same thing? Isn't it close enough? Do you have to write that ticket?

Things change (they're always changing), but I don't see this intervention as being as violent. In my experience, you wind up having the experience, more or less, as a typical person would have of the film.
I'm with her on that one.
Well, we're being a little unfair in speaking of a person who was basically deaf. Again, you agreed that 1.1 to 1.2 is not Yackety-Saxing, so we're getting off the map when we speak of people who are radically impaired in terms of perception.

I'd prefer to stick to metaphors of lightly tinted sunglasses and hearing aids for those who can still, basically hear (even if their frequency range is not quite 100%).
Good question. My answer is it is precisely because there isn't really that much of a difference. I am lazy. I have found it easier to just playback files in normal tempo. You have to go into settings a monkey around to speed things up. That, and I find that I am not as inclined to "gut it out" with media that I don't like or which drags on too much.
A behaviorist robot debates a mystic cultist?

Here is where I'll call upon Wellek.

• The poem is not marks on the page. If it were, we could not recite the poem aloud.
• The painting is not the viewer's response. If it were, we would be left with a new painting for every varying experience of it.
  
• A book is not the writer's private intention. If it were and the author failed in achieving her intention, we would never have "the book."
• A film is not an ideal Platonic object. Artworks are symbolic and our symbol systems change over time.
• The work of art is a system of norms which govern symbol use. Part of the reason that an artwork like a poem can be lost to time is that we can lose our memory of a language. If that poem was not successfully (however imperfectly) translated into a living language and it's idiomatic norms, it is simply lost even if a token of the poem (etched on a clay tablet somewhere) remains.

We approach an artwork, in part, to have an experience, but the artwork is not the experience. Moreover, we can recognize even the intended experience (the total message including objective facts, but also intended affect) in an artwork without having experience it when we recognize it (e.g., we can recognize the funniness of a joke without laughing).

I am approaching the artwork as a system of norms. A temporary accomplishment (systems of norms change and expire) resulting in an objectivity and a loose intersubjectivity (in the experience of the thing). You're looking for the artwork in the ectoplasm, so to speak. And this, I believe, is mistaken.
You're not playing fair. Again, we've agreed that I am not Yackety-Saxing, right? Moreover, I agree that we approach the work of art to have an experience. And although there are infinitely variable experiences of an artwork we may, nevertheless, share a loose "average" experience which a given experience of it approaches. And before you try to make the move of reducing the work of art to the "average" experience (the Lowest Common Denominator), be warned that Wellek has arguments against this idea, as well. At any rate, I acknowledge that adding speed does have a small effect, but I also maintain that within limits the experience of speed is relative and that our brains recalibrate the experience into "normal time" (e.g., time "slows down" in a car accident, the conscious mind is actually a half-second behind reality).
Well, if my stance were that extreme, it would be. But I think you've straw manned it a wee bit.
Gads! You make it sound like I cannot really understand that the protagonist is bored being idle in a cage without having the escape of speeding things along. Your cut of the Count of Monte Cristo would be 21 years long if we did not have some release from "being Danton" in that prison cell!

But even Jeanne Dielmann is "only" 201 minutes long and not 4,320 minutes. The film merely refers to her life. It offers a reference, a depiction, and we "get it" with the 201 minute run time. I dare say we would still get it if we sped things up to 1.1 to 1.2 x speed.
I don't disagree that we approach an artwork in the hopes of having an experience, but I merely protest that we can have substantively similar experiences under varying viewing conditions.

One movie my two friends said was too long was Malcolm X, and they said they should have cut off the first third and just start out with Malcolm in prison. But I disagree...

I feel that by showing what Malcolm was like for a third of the movie before prison that we really get a feel for his character change and would not have that feel if it was just referrenced to in dialogue to save time.

I also can't help but find a soft spot for Apacolypse Now Redux even though a lot of fans say the original is better because Redux was too long. Maybe it's because I saw Redux first and didn't even know there was a different original cut until later, but I find myself drawn to Redux more for some reason.

Dune isn t what i expected, it s too slow and not interesting enough

Sorry for the late response, but I wanted to think more about this before I give it the response it deserves. I don’t want to go too far down into the question of “what is art?” And don’t want to derail the thread too much further, but I do feel you deserve a response.

I have no issue with art as a concept, but I do feel it isn’t evenly applied and even more often it’s treated as if some box to check to decide if a film is “worthy” of consideration or not. If it isn’t considered artistic, it’s deemed a “soulless” exorcise , which to me, misses the point.

Without going too much into specifics, it comes down to how you and I differ in our approach in viewing films. Which is quite fine! We both have our own way of viewing these through our own lens.
I approach film first by determining how it effects me and I ask why? I pay attention to the details, the directions, the acting, the cinematography and so on. But not all of these criteria have to be met. And the question of whether this is artistic or not doesn’t even enter my mind.

Certainly I have found quite a large amount of films that I have found artistic to be worthy films. Daisies, Last Year at Marienbad, The films of Bergman and Bunuel and the previously mentioned Tarkovsky and Santa Sangre (although I was luke warm towards this, I feel I need to give it another chance, as I suspect I’m just not familiar with Jodorowsky).

These films are artistic, and there isn’t any doubt about that. But I’m not going to find that in alot of superhero films due to being a different technique, but they don’t need to artistic, to be worthy obviously. Nolan’s Batman trilogy is, to me and without hyperbole, classics, because of how they delve into the psyche of the eponymous hero, and shows us the depth of his character. They don’t need to be artistic, although I do acknowledge the art behind the craft, but those are two different things, in my mind.

How could it ever be evenly applied, if the definition of it is ultimately completely subjective? In many ways it is just an umbrella term for all the things which aren't sufficiently covered by the considerably more black and white term 'craft'. Yes, the idea of a films 'artistic' success does factor with me, but its not like I expect other to have the same conditions that allow a movie to qualify. It is a term I employ in explaining why a movie works for me. Or why it leaves me cold, even if otherwise well made. It's not a term that should be used to bludgeon others into agreement.


It's not like my goal when watching a movie is to sniff out the 'artistic' in it. It's not a badge I pin on the movie when I'm done with it. And if it doesn't get such recognition, I hold my nose in its presence. Instead, much of our conversation has had to do with your question of 'why do we even need to us such a term'. And my answer comes in two parts. The first part is that you aren't obligated to us it. At all. When you speak and write and think about a film, if relying on elements that one would more likely call 'craft' is enough for you, its understandable why you would have no use for the word. Craft covers a lot of ground when it comes to criticism.



But for me, I'd be left completely in the wilderness if left to defend a lot of the films I like simply by how 'competent' they are. Or well crafted. A lot of what I like deliberately defies conventions. And I don't want to rely on simply saying the film worked because it was 'weird' or 'difficult' or 'breaks the rules'. Because that would come off as completely juvenile. And so my struggle to explain why these particular films move me forces me to look at what they do from a perspective that forces me to break the movie apart and try to think about it from different angles. Consider elements that might not be on screen. Think about what the film means to cinema as a whole. How maybe I can use the movie as a magnifying glass to investigate the personality of the director who made it. There are literally no end of ways to consider a piece of art when we do this, which is liberating. It gives value to all of the outsider voices out there that are generally being slagged off by those who do not approve.


As mentioned in a previous post, the types of films I like are constantly under attack for their very legitimacy. People get quite angry at films they find stupid or boring being considered with any kind of seriousness. There has been some recent evidence of this in another thread here, just recently. And it is always disheartening to see how unacceptable some find films that employ eccentric or primitive styles and methods. At least when I can start to discuss a film from an 'artistic perspective', it allows me to share why something that might appear so alien or ridiculous or cheap to another person, speaks to me so deeply. Of course, I'll still most likely get labelled as a snob or pretentious for doing so, but I can live with that, as long as I have a chance to not be sitting here with all of these movies I love, completely isolated from sharing them with anyone else.



Sorry about another lengthy response, I legit only meant to write about a hundred words, but I just get lost when I start typing. There will be no offense taken if you don't respond, since we don't want to derail this thread any further (I should have probably just redirected this conversation towards my thread, where I'm happy to live in a constant state of derailment)

It was exactly what kind of movie I wanted it to be: an excellent adaptation of the novel, the only major issue is that it does not cover the whole novel. A few minor issues involve the acting by the lead and zendaya, which is not quite up to the level of their seniors.

I can always pinpoint a scene or two that were totally unnecessary