🎬 #228 How To Watch A Film.
First of all, I’m sorry for the missed week last week. I was visiting home and took the week off, but this week is another little piece about something that sounds stupidly simple.
Please enjoy
Bry
When I’m watching a film at home, even though I feel like I’m fully involved in it, I’ll still feel the draw of my phone if it’s sitting nearby. I’ll pick it up to reply to messages or just find myself looking / checking other things on it, related to the film or not. And this is someone who really enjoys watching films and talking about them. We find ourselves taking a quick glance at our phones, one eye on the smaller screen and another on the bigger one. Feeling like we can keep abreast of the stories going on on both at once. But we don’t just watch films for plot. We watch them to succumb to another place or another POV, we watch them to learn something new about ourselves, or just for joyful escapism or a laugh. But no matter why we watch, we don’t get the best of them if we’re distracted by the smaller device in the room. We don’t get the good of either, because our focus is like that parable of the donkey stuck between hay and water. Not knowing which to go to first, it dies from lack of either source of sustenance. And it takes time to get pulled into a film’s rhythm, if we don’t give it a chance, we don’t give ourselves a chance at an optimum experience.
Films also weren’t designed to be segmented into two or three parts over multiple nights, I have also found myself doing this. They were made to be enjoyed as one unbroken experience. Like an unbroken spell, we need that time to fall under its influence. They are not designed to be diluted over days. That consistent viewing translates into an arc that takes us on a singular journey, the emotional payoff landing much harder if enjoyed as it should be. If you’ve ever sought out individual scenes from a film on YouTube, which I have, no matter how great the scene is as a standalone piece, a cinematic clipping, I’d argue that removed from its whole, it loses some of its power. Purely because it was meant to be enjoyed within a very specific sequence of sound and image building up to deliver emotional effects over the course of 90 - 120 - 180 or more minutes.
In a world where focus feels like it’s increasingly diffuse, films enjoyed in one sitting, without distraction, are a bit of a treatment. An exercise in keeping our attention on one thing at one time, which can seem like a lost art. This is why the sanctuary of the cinema is so important. As I mentioned before, it’s one of the few remaining places where our focus can be undisturbed and together as a community we can all see something at the same time, unbroken and beautiful.