Feature film or super long film, what is the problem with film length?
Viewers who watched a restored version of "Gone with the Wind" during this year's Shanghai Film Festival will probably remember that the 238-minute film is divided into two parts, with a brief inter-scene pause in between. In fact, in the early years, when screenings were really similar to a theater or opera performance.
Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight was released a few years ago, and at one point he fanfare played up the 182-minute film as a return to the old-school practice of near-forgotten "pauses between scenes" during screenings.
In this way, the 140-minute "Spider-Man: Across the Universe" that barely lays out suspense, the 140-minute "Fast and Furious 10" that pushes the brakes, and the 164-minute "Mission Impossible 7" that is decomposed next - these mainstream Hollywood movies are getting longer and longer, and even cutting a movie in half and releasing it in upper and lower parts, not to mention the creation of a "product manager" who earns two bucks in one movie, but more like returning to the old road again, to make new additions and subtractions between dramatic narrative and audiovisual spectacle.
The story is told, the movie is longer
Looking back at the early films, most of the masterpieces were huge "super long films".
When the movie first spread as a "folk entertainment" method, it was called "five-cent theater", as long as you spend 1 5-cent nickel coin, go to the blackout caravan to watch a short dynamic movie scene, most of which are thrilling and exciting scenes, no plot to speak of, like a "ghost journey" without a beginning and no end. This is an early "attraction film" that was seen as "juggling".
The audience quickly tired of the simple stimulation brought by dynamic pictures such as "train entering the station", and the practitioners of image production gradually groped the dramatic effect of photography, editing, lighting and other technical means on the "flowing picture", and the improvement of technology promoted the development of the film at the level of narrative festivals, gradually deepening the portrayal of the psychology of the characters, rendering the atmosphere, and emphasizing the form and style of storytelling.
Let the audience be interested in the beautiful face and body of the actor, let them enter the inner world of the people in the play, and introduce the audience's mood into the plot of the drama - these are all premised on the continuous expansion of the length of the film. The first round of development of film technology and the initial formation of narrative created the first wave of golden age of American cinema, giving birth to a series of "super long films", such as the 193-minute "The Birth of a Nation", the 163-minute "Party is the Same and Different", and the 239-minute "Greed", the length of the film became a necessary element of the "grand production".
Griffiths directed "The Birth of a Nation" in 1915, which has been very mature in the closed loop of family clutch drama, presenting spectacular big scenes and delicate emotional scenes in parallel. In the most famous passage of "The Birth of a Nation", the magnificent battlefield and the ruined home appear in the clip, the magnificent scene of the military flag on the plain, turning to the destroyed manor in the south in a second, following the painful eyes of the returning hero, the audience sees the close-up picture, the former golden and jade lady is wearing an old mink coat, which is stained with cotton wool.
It takes long enough to integrate larger-than-reality spectacle and a complete plot into a self-consistent story like this. This evoked the enthusiasm of audiences and the charm of star actors, and from the late 1910s to the entire 1920s, these large-scale productions began the most creative decade of cinema, delving into the ways in which audiovisual forms and narratives fit in. As the entertainment industry passed the abuse period, the studio's constraints on the length of the film made the film have to make trade-offs between the elements of "scene", "emotion" and "plot" for the sake of maximizing interests, which inspired different "film types" that each focused on later.
The camera slows down, and the movie is longer again
In the 1950s and 1960s, Hollywood once again saw a wave of "super-feature films": 1956's "The Ten Commandments" 232 minutes, 1959's "Binhu" 213 minutes, 1962's "Lawrence of Arabia" 216 minutes, 1963's "Cleopatra" 192 minutes.
The epic theme and the length of more than three hours were once popular, and the widespread use of widescreen technology was related. Widescreen cinema, Chinese literal translation of CinemaScope, was developed by French filmmakers as early as 1927. Abel Guns, the master of the French silent film era, invented the "widescreen" under limited technical conditions and with great creativity in adapting to local conditions when shooting the epic film "Napoleon", he attached a lens to the front of the camera, and finally the finished film presented an ultra-wide format image when it was projected.
The widescreen picture pattern is close to the meaning of the oriental long scroll, which is very different from the traditional Western painting. The first widescreen film in the United States was born in 1953 with the release of "Holy Robe" by 20th Century Fox, which improved the technology created by the French and tried to render "historical magnificence" with a wider format.
"Holy Robe" itself is not a film with high artistic achievements, but its release has opened the "horizons" of American filmmakers and triggered a major change in screen size. Since then, the length to width ratio of 1.33:1 has gradually disappeared into history, and 2.35:1 and 16:9 have become the main frames of commercial films, and the screen of the film has become wider and the image is more magnificent.
But the wide composition brings a problem, the picture no longer fits the natural area of human sight, that is, the audience sitting in the theater near the screen part of the film has to constantly turn their heads most of the time to be able to see the whole picture. This directly leads the director to use close-ups carefully, which is likely to confuse the front-row audience. On set, the camera had to retreat farther away from the actors, so that the actors and scenes were lined up on a ribbon frame, a "clothesline" composition in the industry. Changes in scenery and composition have a crucial impact on the way editing is made. In order to allow the audience enough time to see the details on the screen, the time of a single shot is stretched, long shots are used a lot in shooting, and the scene scheduling inside the lens is more important than switching between lenses. During this period, the average length of a movie shot increased from 11 seconds to 13 seconds. The slowdown of the pace of editing, the lengthening of the shot time, and the increase in the drama scheduling in the static space are the inevitable result of the fact that the film length is greatly extended.
The special effects are not enough, and the movie is long again
From the 1950s to the 1970s, mainstream commercial films formed differentiated competition with television networks in order to retain audiences, and the magnificent images of the big screen and the texture of "audiovisual opera" constituted the "irreplaceable" characteristics of films. Until the 1980s, with the rise of music television (MTV), the increasing intersection of the film industry and popular music, and the expansion of television advertising caused advertising people to enter Hollywood, these factors brought disruptive changes to Hollywood commercial films.
MTV's global popularity has transformed the perception of video style and culture among young people around the world, and MTV has created a huge market for young audiences. At first, MTV's shooting drew a lot of resources from classic Hollywood, from the situation, bridge, shooting perspective to editing method, all of which were borrowed from the movie. But in the end, MTV has destructively shaped a new generation of viewers to pursue short and fast viewing fun. The closed-loop theatrical structure, delicate performance, and scene scheduling full of narrative sense have all become outdated fun.
"Star Wars", "Indiana Jones", "Top Gun", "Home Alone", "Batman", these 1980s super-grossing movies, the common point is to use dynamic images to create the audience's emotional hi in the shortest time, the impact of color, sound and light and shadow, far more than the hidden dramatic tension between the characters, through the "high concept" setting to present a floating social landscape, replacing the subtle inner world.
Warner Studios and Time merged to form Time Warner, which imported DC Comics' package of superheroes to established studios, and Tim Burton's "Batman" heralded the arrival of a super entertainment era: the pace of movies was fast, the time was shorter, and coincidentally, it was followed by the rapid advancement of CGI digital technology in the 1990s. As a result, Hollywood commercial films further abandoned the plot and narrative, returned to the ideas of earlier films, and formed a new round of "attractive movies" with more expensive investment, more complex technology, and more exciting to watch.
In the 1990s and the first 20 years of the century, the Hollywood industry drained superhero movies of "contemporary attraction." Streaming and short videos have intensified the "impossible task" of capturing public attention, so much so that the entire film industry has reached a crossroads in search of alternatives and remedies. The pending "Spider-Man: Across the Universe" and the abruptly terminated "Mission Impossible 7" are not a one-and-done solution, they are more like open-ended questions without answers: after more than a hundred years of copying Griffith's ideas, in the highly routine classic drama structure, expanding the high-intensity, stimulating the audience's senses of spectacle, without reconstructing a new balance of narrative and audio-visual, will this be a sustainable path for commercial films?
Author: Liu Qing
Editor: Jiang Fang