Attention spans and cutting rhythm

Last week, Mr Gray sent me a photocopy from the New Scientist about a paper from Cornell University that analyses attention span and cutting rhythm in Hollywood movies. Their methods involved analysing cuts and shot length, and comparing them to biological rhythms of human attention span. Essentially what they have achieved is an mechanical version of film editor Walter Murch’s “blink of an eye” theory. He suggests that thoughts and blinking are connected (we blink when we “cut” in our minds from one thought to the next) and by being aware of where one blinks while watching rushes (and also by watching when good actors in the movies blink) you can tell when a cut will feel “right” emotionally.

Some of the sources reporting on this story lazily conclude:

The researchers concluded that over the next few decades film makers may take more care to follow the 1/f law to try to boost audience engagement.

This is almost the exact opposite of what the authors of the paper really conclude:

In no way do we claim that there is any intention on the part of filmmakers to develop a 1/f film style, even if they knew what that might be. Instead, we claim that, as explorations and crafting of film have proceeded for at least 70 years, film narrative has fallen naturally into 1/f shot structure as the myriad of other considerations in filmmaking have played against each other in shaping film form. Good storytelling is the balancing of constraints at multiple scales of presentation. Thus, we view 1/f film form as an emergent, self-organizing structure (Gilden, 2001; Van Orden et al., 2003), not as an intentional one.

It seems to me that the underlying assumption of the paper is, however, that shots in a movie can only carry one idea and need to be cut once that idea has been communicated. This is not a satisfactory way to understand the achievement of films that make use of sequence shots. Many high-grossing Hollywood movies of the “classical” period made much use of long shots with complex camera movements. This style leads – and holds – the viewer’s attention without fast cutting, and in some cases without cutting at all. An extreme example is Hitchcock’s Rope which is intended to be one long sequence shot with no cuts. A better example, because its style was emulated for commercial and artistic reasons, is the following shot from Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm

Between 2:44 and 6:01 of this shot there are no cuts whatsoever. That’s ONE SHOT that lasts 3 minutes and 27 seconds. The Man with a Golden Arm was a commercially successful film which paved the way for Hollywood movies to explore the subject of drug addiction. It would also not fit the cutting model proposed by Cornell’s scientists at all. Why, then, was something so antithetical to natural human attention span so successful?

Well, put simply, cutting isn’t the only way to direct a viewer’s attention. As for why it was used, and why this style has fallen out of use, attention span is only half the story. In this period of film history the studio system was at its height. Camera crews worked together regularly in the same sound stages, and it was easy and – as Preminger proved – cheap to shoot movies using this extended take sequence shot style. An added artistic advantage is that it allowed actors time and space to create subtle, nuanced performances. Furthermore, this style allows the viewer time to investigate the space within the frame, picking up on small details.

It is notable that the films that fit most closely with the attention span formula of the Cornell team are action films. Certainly when you’re planning to cut very quickly, you seldom have time for more than one idea per frame. As Mr Gray noted in biro on the bottom of the photocopied article:

[Is it] that modern films have less to look at, that their compositions and choice of inclusions have grown simpler due to a simplifying market?

It is worth noting that the film the Cornell scientists observed to adhere most rigidly to the 1/f shot sequence structure was The Phantom Menace.

Links:
The New Scientist: Cine-Maths grabs our fickle attention
Attention and the Evolution of the Hollywood Film