The Film Students Who Can No Longer Sit Through Films
by haunter on 1/31/2026, 4:26:35 PM
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/college-students-movies-attention-span/685812/
Comments
by: semilin
If you really care about something, screen addiction does not interfere. A friend of mine has a terrible Instagram addiction, yet has developed for himself a certain degree of cinephilia lately -- we've watched long movies together in theaters and not once has he been on his phone during the screenings. When one has faith that sustained attention might hold more value than that gained by interruption, they tend to prioritize the former.<p>But the article points out that the students here don't even watch movies themselves -- "students have struggled to name any film" they recently watched. Why are these people even studying film? The inattention is clearly caused by disinterest.<p>The phenomenon observed here must be caused by a combination of the general loss of discipline (which is the fallback attentive mechanism when interest is absent) and students' disinterest in the field they <i>chose</i> to study. The former has been well known; the latter is worth considering more.
1/31/2026, 5:14:03 PM
by: rwc
"Many students are resisting the idea of in-person screenings altogether. Given the ease of streaming assignments from their dorm rooms, they see gathering in a campus theater as an imposition."<p>Students telegraphing to the film world that a coming generation of consumers simply won't be going to the theatre. The article is framed as a tragedy about the students, but it's actually a tragedy about the professors and institution of moviegoing.
1/31/2026, 5:02:31 PM
by: bloqs
Just needs to be broken down into series of scrollable short format clips with different dramatic snippets of distorted music over each one
1/31/2026, 4:58:57 PM
by: crazygringo
Counterpoint from the article:<p>> <i>A handful of professors told me they hadn’t noticed any change. Some students have always found old movies to be slow, Lynn Spigel, a professor of screen cultures at Northwestern University, told me. “But the ones who are really dedicated to learning film always were into it, and they still are.”</i><p>The article doesn't actually give any evidence attention spans are shortened. Many of the movies you study in film school are genuinely excruciatingly slow and boring, unless you're hyper-motivated. Before mobile phones, you didn't have any choice but to sit through it. Now you have a choice. I suspect that film students 30 years ago, despite having a "full attention span", would also have been entertaining themselves on phones if they'd had them.<p>I <i>love</i> movies. But I also make liberal use of 2x speed and +5s during interminably long suspense sequences that are literally just someone walking through a dark environment while spooky music plays. It's not that I suffer from a short attention span, it's that there's nothing to pay attention to. There's no virtue in suffering through boredom.
1/31/2026, 5:13:44 PM
by: treelover
Is it a loss of attention span, or is the 2-hour feature film simply an outdated format for the current generation?<p>The information density of a slow 1970s drama is incredibly low compared to the multi-stream environment they grew up in. They aren't necessarily 'dumber'; their brains are just optimized for high-frequency information processing, whereas cinema is optimized for immersion.
1/31/2026, 5:08:43 PM
by: ksymph
Why would someone study film if they're not interested in it? People have been bored by movies nearly as long as movies have existed; but historically I don't think those people would go into college to study it.<p>What changed? It's not like there's a lot of money in film, so I struggle to understand the motivations there.
1/31/2026, 5:12:10 PM
by: Gimpei
I took a bunch of film classes in college and what they’re not mentioning is that sometimes the films bring assigned are crazy boring. I once had to watch an hour of footage shot from a camera in an outdoor elevator as it went up and down. One hour. The professor said it was the perfect summation of everything he’d been discussing over the term. I swear I’m not joking.
1/31/2026, 5:20:10 PM
by: azinman2
This is so tragic. How are these folks going to lead the world when they cannot pay attention to anything?
1/31/2026, 5:04:44 PM
by: metabagel
If you’re really studying film, there is a lot to pay attention to in every scene. If you’re just watching films to be entertained, then yes, older movies have a slower pace and can sometimes be boring.<p>I think a film student would often be asking themselves why it was shot that way and what they might do differently.
1/31/2026, 5:26:21 PM
by: vitaelabitur
We traded books for films, and now films for short videos, always moving towards what is easier to enjoy.<p>Quite a while ago, books became a taste that needs to be patiently acquired. Someone starting to read today is more likely to develop the taste by gradually easing into books that demand more and more. Say maybe Huxley -> Camus -> Wilde -> Dostoevsky.<p>Now that short clips are here, the same has happened to films. The uninitiated need to sit through Scorsese, Hitchcock, Wilder, Kubrick, Altman before attempting Fellini, Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Ozu, Resnais.<p>And by the way, someone who is naturally inclined to love films (or books) won't be affected, even today. Am I wrong? The way they are described here, I would crush these film students.
1/31/2026, 5:28:24 PM
by: endominus
Why did the author feel the need to throw in a spoiler for the end of <i>The Conversation</i> in the last paragraph of the article? That seems contradictory to the point of everything else she wrote and disrespectful to both the audience and the film.
1/31/2026, 5:21:21 PM
by: lexiathan
In defense of the students: the types of films that you watch as part of a film study curriculum are generally not the same as what most cinema-goers are watching. For example, "Man with a Movie Camera"--or 150 minutes of someone's black and white movie about the life of urban pigeons... present-day film students who grew up watching movies with tight editing, fast cuts, high resolution color and sound, and quick narrative payoffs are not going to respond to these movies the same way that people did a century ago.<p>This is not to say that historical films lack value; but sitting all the way through them with rapt attention is not necessarily as easy as you'd imagine.
1/31/2026, 5:18:26 PM
by: haunter
<a href="https://archive.md/GFWzW" rel="nofollow">https://archive.md/GFWzW</a>
1/31/2026, 4:26:40 PM
by: recursivedoubts
OK, phones & social media are obviously dangerously addictive.<p>Now what?
1/31/2026, 4:55:12 PM
by: thefz
Maybe try presenting them 15 seconds at a time, in portrait mode with bouncy subtitles.
1/31/2026, 5:37:15 PM
by: nottorp
On a tangent, maybe we can save reading by doing more flash fiction?
1/31/2026, 4:55:53 PM
by: mmooss
Often media forms make sense in their original context and make less sense the more the current context differs. In classical music orchestras, for example, many identical instruments play simultaneously, unlike in jazz or blues/folk/rock/pop. IMHO that makes more sense in a context without amplification, without few sounds are that loud (making it more special and dramatic), and in an industrial society where the common solution is lots of workers performing identical tasks. We can also think of media forms as technologies and see them similarly.<p>For video the context is shifting: As an hypothesis, the length of the media could be viewed as ROI for the required commitment. In the context where watching a film required going to a theater, 30 seconds or 30 minutes would be poor ROI - you plan, travel, give up everything else you're doing, pay ... you'd be unhappy if it was over in 30 minutes. In a context where the commitment is pulling your phone from your pocket and tapping it a few times, 30 seconds can be fine and you usually wouldn't want stand there for 2 hours.<p>Each form has advantages and disadvantages; I think it's a normal but clear error to say what came first, what we're more familiar with, is better. We do and will lose things with change, but we'll gain others. We don't lose them completely - there are still classical orchestras though no more riots over a premiere. But the energy of innovation is not in classical music, jazz or rock - people listen to the old stuff mostly - and maybe less in film. I expect that many of the young, innovative geniuses who in the past would have made classical music or jazz or rock, or written novels, are now making computer games - they are embracing the newish frontier, and the exciting thing of their youth.<p>So far, film seems to coexist pretty well; there seems to be plenty of creative energy on the high end, but we'll see. What about small independent films? What about film schools?
1/31/2026, 5:28:17 PM
by: Der_Einzige
How do I sqaure this circle with that the biggest films in the last two decades have been Avatar, Avatar: The Way of Water, and Avatar: Fire and Ash<p>2h 42m, 3 hours 12 minutes, and 3 hours 15 minutes.<p>All 3 are WAY too long and Way of Water in particular felt like it was 4+ hours subjectively.<p>Yet, they're literally the biggest films EVER by gross.<p>So seems the general public has longer attention spans than film students. This isn't the first time that lay people are objectively better/smarter than so-called "professionals" in a field.
1/31/2026, 5:16:57 PM
by: bogdart
If the film students are not able to sit through a film, they just are needed to be kicked out, that's it.
1/31/2026, 5:07:26 PM
by: philipallstar
> Smith has administered similar exams for almost two decades; he had to grade his most recent exam on a curve to keep students’ marks within a normal range.<p>This is really silly. Just fail them. They are not customers.
1/31/2026, 5:00:24 PM
by: bronlund
There is no attention-span crisis, it’s just that the younger generation find a lot of stuff utterly boring. If they do something they love, they have no issue focusing for hours and hours.
1/31/2026, 5:13:14 PM
by: lysace
From a programmer perspective:<p>(Old man yelling at the sky.)<p>It's been this exponential progress in distraction (internet, social networks, weaponizing human psychology to make money).<p>I got into programming in the late 80s/early 90s. If I were a teenager today, I'm not sure I would have the willpower to suffer through enough focused boredom to really learn.
1/31/2026, 5:36:33 PM
by: actionfromafar
This actually made me a little angry, to my surprise. :-D<p>I thought film student was almost like a holy calling, an opportunity that passed me by. Clearly, it's just the equivalent to another biz management course to some of these students.
1/31/2026, 5:02:07 PM
by: amelius
[flagged]
1/31/2026, 4:51:18 PM