“Modern movies may be more engrossing-we get “lost” in them more readily-because the universe’s natural rhythm is driving the mind.”

James Cutting, Jordan DeLong and Christine Nothelfer from their paper on human attention span and film.

Common wisdom claims that MTV and our ramped-up, multi-tasking, instantly communicating world have affected the way editors cut and films are made. More on this subject in the future but for today, I want to focus on one common complaint; shortened cut durations.

A Cornell University cognitive psychology professor and two of his grad students interested in the human mind and its attention span read the research on artworks, speech, and music. Then they applied the theories to 150 popular Hollywood movies shot between 1935 and 2005 in five genres: action, adventure, animation, comedy and drama. To do this, they used video-only .avi files to measure the duration of each shot in each scene and published and article in February in Psychological Science Online.

“Our unit of investigation was the shot.”

Slope, 1/f fluctuation, lag, white noise, traveling windows, Fourier analysis and mathematical formulas – all figured into their methods of analysis. I will summarize their research and findings but if you’d like to dig deeper, read the full article, Attention and the Evolution of Hollywood Film.

Observations

The researchers studied “Hollywood style” editing and filmmaking which they defined as the invisible style that “…is designed to suppress awareness of the presentational aspects of the film while promoting the narrative.” They believe Hollywood movies differ in style from documentaries, news, sitcoms, music videos, and art films. While I disagree – I think all genres use invisible editing most of the time and that Hollywood movies differ only from the above genres (except documentary) because they are “long form” (100 minutes on average) – I agree that they make a great case for study. I’d like to see them study TV with its shorter life span and thousands of hours more of footage. But, on to their report!

The trio used a concept from chaos theory – the 1/f fluctuation – which describes a pattern of attention that occurs naturally in the human brain. It can be thought of as a pattern of waves in which the “height” of each component wave varies inversely with frequency (1/f). The 1/f pattern also appears in nature, culture, engineering, and economics.

Findings

The most engaging and successful films were subsequently imitated by other filmmakers, so that over time and through cultural transmission the industry as a whole evolved toward an imitation of this natural cognitive pattern.

James Cutting, Jordan DeLong and Christine Nothelfer from their paper on human attention span and film.

The prof and his students found that more recent films – those made after 1980- matched the 1/f pattern found – natural rhythm of the mind. They believe this has occurred over time as the 125 year old art form that is filmmaking has evolved. Their results also suggest that “Hollywood film has become increasingly clustered in packets of shots of similar length.” Action flicks, with their short shot durations, are closest to the 1/f pattern, followed by adventure, animation, comedy and drama.

While they recognize that filmmakers have “particular styles, preferences, and skills,” they believe that films and filmmakers influence each other (we knew that) and that both individuation and influence will continue.

Conclusions

“We suggest that over the next 50 years or so, and with action films likely leading the way, Hollywood film will evolve toward a shot structure that more generally matches the 1/f patterns found elsewhere in physics, biology, culture, and the mind.”

So does this mean we’ll all be working faster and creating show that go by with the blink of an eye? Not! The researchers continue, “But is the task of the filmmaker solely to keep information flow and visual momentum (visual information uptake) sufficiently high to ward off the mind’s natural restlessness? Not likely. Otherwise, all films would be composed of unremittingly short shots.

Finally, they acknowledged that viewers do not rate movies based on shot duration, stating, “Good storytelling is the balancing of constraints at multiple scales of presentation… film editors design shot patterns with care, generating a visual momentum in the viewer, who tracks the narrative.”

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