[ExI] squeeze the classics

Sun Jun 5 20:38:59 UTC 2016

The problem isn't the old films. The problem is the hyper-active
shortened attention span of the new generation.

BillK

If you repeat something it becomes true.  Or not.  What I'd like to see is
some real data, not news stories, rather than assumptions made from
observing people playing video games and entranced by smart phones.  I
believe that attention span is a basic function of the brain, which
evolution may change, but smartphones not.
Even if you find some differences, they may stem from personality
differences:  extroverts may like these things more than introverts, and
extroverts have shorter spans.

bill w

On Sun, Jun 5, 2016 at 3:10 PM, Dan TheBookMan <danust2012 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Jun 5, 2016 at 11:06 AM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
> > Perhaps some here have noticed that our collective decreasing
> > attention spans apply to ourselves as well as the younger set.
>
> I often wonder about this -- whether it's actually true, whether it's
> significant, and whether it's a bad thing. I've not studied it closely,
> hence my skepticism since I only hear about a handful of studies quoted
> endlessly. The significance might be an issue because I'm unsure how well
> it was studied in the past to see if humans, on the whole, had longer or
> shorter attention spans. For instance, looking at long novels from the 18th
> century, one has to also remember that only a small sliver of society at
> that time was reading them -- people usually who had the leisure for
> reading long works of literature and, therefore, were not a good
> representative sample of their societies. Given that I have all these
> qualms, I should explore this matter in more depth, but these are my
> current qualms.
>
> > Anyone who has tried to view the 1950s Perry Mason early TV
> > dramas, which were so excellent at the time, but unimaginable in
> > any courtroom today.  We haven’t the ability to concentrate at that
> > level for the required time to follow the story.  Today with real-time
> > news, a lot happens in a couple days, or even a few hours.
>
> Have you been in any courtroom recently or back then? I don't know how
> actual courtrooms played out sixty years ago, but I imagine they were as
> tedious and boring as ones today. Did you mean TV courtroom dramas? I doubt
> a 01950s TV drama is a good way to measure how actual courtroom trials
> played out -- any more than how a war film from that time tells us how a
> battle went or what soldiers did or felt during war.
>
> > Yesterday I was viewing one of my old favorite movies, Bogart and
> > Bergman in Casablanca.  Excellent story!  But the pace of life is
> > so slow, it got me to wondering.  These old classics are pretty
> > much out of reach of the younger generation,
>
> How much younger? Was "Casablanca" really a young person's film when it
> was released in 01942? I've enjoyed the film, but I only really sat down to
> watch it when I was in my late teens. (And I was probably atypical even at
> that time.) I don't think I would've watched it through at 8 or 15 years of
> age. Not sure, but I'm also not sure what you're expecting here. I imagine,
> too, people watching it in 01942 were watching something about their times.
> People watching it in 01952 were watching something about the not so
> distant past, about stuff that happened during their lifetime and that they
> might have been somewhat involved in -- the war and all that -- or read
> about in the papers, etc. Even by the 01970s, I imagine most people would
> know people -- parents or grandparents who were directly attached to those
> times. By the time I sat down to watch it seriously -- 1990s -- it was
> already a more distant past, but someone watching it now -- say, in the
> terms or twenties, it's even a generation further removed.
>
> > but what if we figure out a way to somehow edit them, cut out
> > some of the dead space?
>
> That's an interesting idea. I'm not sure what the dead space is in
> "Casablanca." I once had the idea that a good film class would be taking
> any classic film and trimming a scene or rearranging the scenes -- without
> adding anything -- would improve the work. (That something's a classic
> shouldn't mean no one should ever tinker with it or presume the work is as
> close to perfection as is.) "Casablanca" might be a good candidate for
> that. Recollecting it -- the last time I saw it was about a year ago -- I
> think it's already fairly tight, but I'd have to look at it with an eye
> (and ear) toward cutting it down.
>
> > Can it be done?  Could we somehow shorten old movies without losing the
> thread?
> > If we did, would there be a dozen different abridged Casablancas out
> there
> > competing for attention?
>
> To be sure, sometimes this was done already. There are different versions
> of films out there where parts are cut out, especially to suit it for TV or
> back when many audiences tended to not like really long films. (Yes, one
> thing I noted was that the three plus hour film has risen in a recent
> years. Granted, no one is churning out something like "The Human Condition"
> (over 9 hours), but there are many films released today in the two hours
> plus category that make wide release.)
>
> Would this be a bad thing? There are many versions of "Hamlet" on film.
> What's wrong with each generation discovering its own version of "Hamlet"?
> (This reminds me of how every few years certain classics of literature get
> a new translation. Think of "The Iliad," which, happily, gets translated
> into English probably once a decade. Butler's Iliad, which I read preteen,
> is very different than the one by the late Robert Fagles. No reason to
> stick with Butler's Victorian prose over Fagles or anyone else. I imagine
> some of this is the conception of the poem changes over time and new
> discoveries are made.) And with film anything lasting like the printed
> text, one can still refer to the earlier versions. (Any stage adaptation of
> anything is likely to depart from the so called original text, so why
> should film versions not do likewise?)
>
> By the way, for some strange reason, your use of Casablancas in the plural
> makes me think of the novel _Draculas_. Much fun to be had there. :)
>
> Regards,
>
> Dan
>  Please take a peek at my latest Kindle book at:
> http://mybook.to/Gurlitt
>
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