In one of the great dichotomies of the universe, movies are getting longer and longer, while audience attention spans are getting shorter. While studios pump out tentpole movies like Avatar: Fire and Ash (197 minutes) and even disposable, mass-market fare like the latest Superman are 2 hours and 9 minutes long, generations of audiences now trained by their phones simply can’t focus.
The Atlantic has published a feature that surveyed twenty film studies professors. They say the lack of attention span and multiscreening with phones is now noticeable in their classrooms. Some professors have now resorted to showing movies in segments.
Even worse, even in this cut-up format, students are not paying attention and cannot answer basic questions about what they have just watched.
The article references a post on X where a professor screened François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim at a positively lean 105 minutes. More than half the class failed the multiple choice quiz about what just watched, referenceing Nazi’s in their answers when the film is set in World War I.
The rest of the article is just as grim and depressing. Quoting Craig Erpelding, a film professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison:
“I used to think, If homework is watching a movie, that is the best homework ever, but students will not do it.”
Akira Mizuta Lippit is a cinema and media-studies professor at the University of Southern California, and he likened his students to fidgeting nicotine addicts going through withdrawal when not checking their phones.
When he screened Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation and stressed the importance of the final scene, even then, several students had their faces buried in their phones.
Data from the campus internal streaming platform showed that less than 50% started the films recommended by the syllabus, and only 20% made it to the end. Some professors say students struggle to name a recently watched film, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to find movies that they have all watched to find shared experiences and viewpoints.
Clearly, the dream many of us potentially had of studying film in a prestigious programme like USC is completely wasted on the useless young.
