Studying whether I'm doing it wrong
November 11, 2011 11:55 AM Subscribe
I'm interested in learning about the experience of watching a movie from other people's perspectives. Do most people become fully absorbed into the movie's story, or remain slightly aloof and analyze the construction of the movie, or varying levels of both, but at what levels?
To flesh out the questions a bit more: What do people feel/think while watching a movie, either a good one or bad one? Do people who make movies anticipate that their audiences will be fully absorbed in the story and intend to produce that experience (so that if you have "meta"-type thoughts during the movie, you've sort of failed to get the point)?
I'd like to find academic articles about this from a film theory perspective, or articles from film critics or enthusiasts, or somehow otherwise getting a thoughtful understanding of the experiences of people in audiences. It'd be especially great if this stuff could take into account varying movie genres and cultures! Personal experiences might be helpful too.
(I'm curious because I watch movies partly paying attention to how the story was produced, and I really enjoy doing that kind of analysis while watching stuff — I was a literature student in college — and my friend finds this very strange and says I'm missing out on the actual full experience of watching movies like he does, where he suspends analysis until afterward, or until watching the movie a second time. I'm curious about how far off I really am, and I'm also interested in understanding the whole movie experience better.)
The answers on this previous question included a few related concepts — ego death, mindfulness, Lacanian sutures — but sort of tangentially, so I'd like to find more pointers. Thanks!
To flesh out the questions a bit more: What do people feel/think while watching a movie, either a good one or bad one? Do people who make movies anticipate that their audiences will be fully absorbed in the story and intend to produce that experience (so that if you have "meta"-type thoughts during the movie, you've sort of failed to get the point)?
I'd like to find academic articles about this from a film theory perspective, or articles from film critics or enthusiasts, or somehow otherwise getting a thoughtful understanding of the experiences of people in audiences. It'd be especially great if this stuff could take into account varying movie genres and cultures! Personal experiences might be helpful too.
(I'm curious because I watch movies partly paying attention to how the story was produced, and I really enjoy doing that kind of analysis while watching stuff — I was a literature student in college — and my friend finds this very strange and says I'm missing out on the actual full experience of watching movies like he does, where he suspends analysis until afterward, or until watching the movie a second time. I'm curious about how far off I really am, and I'm also interested in understanding the whole movie experience better.)
The answers on this previous question included a few related concepts — ego death, mindfulness, Lacanian sutures — but sort of tangentially, so I'd like to find more pointers. Thanks!
(I also don't like that working in production makes it harder to get absorbed, because that part of your brain that analyses is more likely to start ticking away. So in a sense, knowing a lot about what I'm seeing can make it harder to enjoy it, from my perspective, but it sounds like for you, that is the part that you enjoy the most)
posted by -harlequin- at 12:47 PM on November 11, 2011
posted by -harlequin- at 12:47 PM on November 11, 2011
I think this varies a lot from person to person. Even among film critics, you'll see some of them at every screening with notebooks out, scribbling furiously from opening titles to end-credits scroll, while others sit placidly, hands empty, immersed in the action on screen.
And it also varies a lot from film to film. If I find myself checking my watch a lot during a movie, I realize that I'm not especially enjoying it, even if I hadn't consciously registered my own impatience. Conversely, if I realize I've almost forgotten to breathe for the last 10 minutes, I might think, "Gosh, I guess this is a good 'un."
I think that filmmakers would tell you, straight down the line, that if you're not fully absorbed in the story, they haven't done their jobs right. A good edit is the one you don't see, etc., the best cinematography doesn't get in the way of the performances, a great performance doesn't call undue attention to itself, etc. At the same time, if you're really into movies I think it's hard for an attentive viewer not to appreciate a bravura Martin Scorsese tracking shot or a great sunset or a felicitous jump cut.
Also, there's that story about Columbia honcho Harry Cohn, who used to claim that he could measure the success of a film by how much his butt squirmed during its run. ("Imagine," cracked Herman J. Mankiewicz, "the whole world wired to Harry Cohn's ass!")
posted by Joey Bagels at 12:53 PM on November 11, 2011
And it also varies a lot from film to film. If I find myself checking my watch a lot during a movie, I realize that I'm not especially enjoying it, even if I hadn't consciously registered my own impatience. Conversely, if I realize I've almost forgotten to breathe for the last 10 minutes, I might think, "Gosh, I guess this is a good 'un."
I think that filmmakers would tell you, straight down the line, that if you're not fully absorbed in the story, they haven't done their jobs right. A good edit is the one you don't see, etc., the best cinematography doesn't get in the way of the performances, a great performance doesn't call undue attention to itself, etc. At the same time, if you're really into movies I think it's hard for an attentive viewer not to appreciate a bravura Martin Scorsese tracking shot or a great sunset or a felicitous jump cut.
Also, there's that story about Columbia honcho Harry Cohn, who used to claim that he could measure the success of a film by how much his butt squirmed during its run. ("Imagine," cracked Herman J. Mankiewicz, "the whole world wired to Harry Cohn's ass!")
posted by Joey Bagels at 12:53 PM on November 11, 2011
I have no experience in film, though I do have acting training. I always analyze the movie. Everything about it: the acting, dialogue, cinematography, plot, symbolism, etc. I'm never fully "absorbed." If I were to apply -harlequin-'s test, I would have to conclude that every movie I've seen is a bad movie, so that's a nonstarter. I don't consider it a bad thing to analyze a movie. That's part of the enjoyment. I have no desire to regress to a childlike state where I'm simply "absorbing" whatever is on the screen without doing any critical thinking.
posted by John Cohen at 1:00 PM on November 11, 2011 [1 favorite]
posted by John Cohen at 1:00 PM on November 11, 2011 [1 favorite]
Others probably have better recommendations for reading about present-day practices than I do, but if you're interested in this stuff from a historical perspective at all, there's an extraordinary book from 1939 called "America at the Movies" that covers several facets of how American audiences were experiencing moviegoing at the time. It was written by Margaret Farrand Thorp, and is currently out of print, but available enough used that I've seen it around in used book stores more than once. Another good read is Terry Staples' very evokative history of English children's cinema clubs - All Pals Together - which gives a lot of space to interviews (both from the past and after the fact) about regular people's reflections on their filmviewing.
For more theoretical stuff, there's a strong tradition of "spectatorship" theory at the University of Chicago's cinema studies department, which has some overlap with the kinds of things you're wondering about (though also generally from a historical perspective). Some big names there are Miriam Hansen and Yuri Tsivian.
I also recommend asking your parents what they remember about going to movies in the past. I've been doing film stuff for awhile now, and only thought to do this recently - but it was very cool to see things about exhibition and viewing practices that I'd only read about confirmed in the recollections of my parents (just little things like the fact that showing up at a screening in the middle of one show and staying through the first half of the next really was totally routine, as famously alluded to in the "...no one will be seated after the start of Alfred Hitchcock's Greatest Shocker..." bit of the trailer for PSYCHO).
Having brought up all this historical stuff, I should add that conscious, analytical film viewing of the kind you describe yourself practicing is a pretty new idea. Though there were certain people all along who believed that cinema had things in common with literature or that it might qualify as Art, for a very long time the conversations around its cultural value had much in common with the conversations today around video games (the 1939 history I mention above gets into some of that). The popularization of auteurism as a framework for film criticism in the 1950s and '60s helped change the tide, but before that I don't think it would have occured to most people to look at a film in any way other than experientially, like your friend. Today, the idea of looking at films analytically, like you do, is pretty mainstream. No one now would think you were crazy for thinking of movies that way. But I'd guess that most people still don't do it.
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Anyway, as you can see, I think about movies a lot - so I'm probably more on your side than your friend's in that no matter how absorbed I am in a film I am actively thinking about it to some degree. At this point, I can't watch any movie without getting at least momentarily distracted by thoughts of shot framing or media specificity or the history of spectatorship or the changeover cues that sometimes even make their way onto DVD transfers. But I still enjoy getting at least partially lost in a good film. And part of why I like seeing things more than once is that I'll be absorbed by different things each time, and I'll be "distracted" by analyzing different things each time. (I don't really even think of it as "distraction" - it's just part of the process of reckoning with this THING that other people made, either directly through involvement with the production - creatively, technically, or otherwise - or indirectly through historical entanglement of one kind or another).
posted by bubukaba at 1:13 PM on November 11, 2011 [2 favorites]
For more theoretical stuff, there's a strong tradition of "spectatorship" theory at the University of Chicago's cinema studies department, which has some overlap with the kinds of things you're wondering about (though also generally from a historical perspective). Some big names there are Miriam Hansen and Yuri Tsivian.
I also recommend asking your parents what they remember about going to movies in the past. I've been doing film stuff for awhile now, and only thought to do this recently - but it was very cool to see things about exhibition and viewing practices that I'd only read about confirmed in the recollections of my parents (just little things like the fact that showing up at a screening in the middle of one show and staying through the first half of the next really was totally routine, as famously alluded to in the "...no one will be seated after the start of Alfred Hitchcock's Greatest Shocker..." bit of the trailer for PSYCHO).
Having brought up all this historical stuff, I should add that conscious, analytical film viewing of the kind you describe yourself practicing is a pretty new idea. Though there were certain people all along who believed that cinema had things in common with literature or that it might qualify as Art, for a very long time the conversations around its cultural value had much in common with the conversations today around video games (the 1939 history I mention above gets into some of that). The popularization of auteurism as a framework for film criticism in the 1950s and '60s helped change the tide, but before that I don't think it would have occured to most people to look at a film in any way other than experientially, like your friend. Today, the idea of looking at films analytically, like you do, is pretty mainstream. No one now would think you were crazy for thinking of movies that way. But I'd guess that most people still don't do it.
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Anyway, as you can see, I think about movies a lot - so I'm probably more on your side than your friend's in that no matter how absorbed I am in a film I am actively thinking about it to some degree. At this point, I can't watch any movie without getting at least momentarily distracted by thoughts of shot framing or media specificity or the history of spectatorship or the changeover cues that sometimes even make their way onto DVD transfers. But I still enjoy getting at least partially lost in a good film. And part of why I like seeing things more than once is that I'll be absorbed by different things each time, and I'll be "distracted" by analyzing different things each time. (I don't really even think of it as "distraction" - it's just part of the process of reckoning with this THING that other people made, either directly through involvement with the production - creatively, technically, or otherwise - or indirectly through historical entanglement of one kind or another).
posted by bubukaba at 1:13 PM on November 11, 2011 [2 favorites]
I think it depends totally on how engrossing you find the film and how technically well done and how well-acted it is. It's like how the wrong pause or prop issue causes a break in the suspension of reality from a play. The idea, I think, is that a successful film should 'transport' you so that you are fully immersed in the story on the screen. For some people that immersion and suspension of reality is easier than for others- see success of Fast and Furious franchise.
posted by bquarters at 1:31 PM on November 11, 2011
posted by bquarters at 1:31 PM on November 11, 2011
I think this is way too personal, and involves too many variables, to make any kind of coherent theory or pattern.
I think everyone has subjects that pull them unthinkingly into movies, and subjects that pull them out. I owned a small movie theater for years, and movies were always referred to by bookers and others in the biz as "product." Would it bring in people, who could I sell it to? Took me years to go back to just enjoying/not enjoying a movie -- and it still crops up occasionally. I have a friend who is a dental hygienist; she does not like to "think about" movies, but says the terrible condition of many stars' gums frequently pulls out of the semi-hypnotic state she prefers. I find it hard to imagine how you could stay blocked to any emotional or aesthetic reactions at all during a film (or why you would want to), but people have very different minds and interests.
A small theater in Seattle, the Harvard Exit, years ago showed a short festival of films that they said were the most powerful they had screened, based on the fact that NO ONE had gotten up to go to the bathroom or buy concessions during any of them. The only one I remember is Jules Dassin's "He Who Must Die." But it seems like a good criteria for a powerful film.
posted by kestralwing at 1:58 PM on November 11, 2011 [2 favorites]
I think everyone has subjects that pull them unthinkingly into movies, and subjects that pull them out. I owned a small movie theater for years, and movies were always referred to by bookers and others in the biz as "product." Would it bring in people, who could I sell it to? Took me years to go back to just enjoying/not enjoying a movie -- and it still crops up occasionally. I have a friend who is a dental hygienist; she does not like to "think about" movies, but says the terrible condition of many stars' gums frequently pulls out of the semi-hypnotic state she prefers. I find it hard to imagine how you could stay blocked to any emotional or aesthetic reactions at all during a film (or why you would want to), but people have very different minds and interests.
A small theater in Seattle, the Harvard Exit, years ago showed a short festival of films that they said were the most powerful they had screened, based on the fact that NO ONE had gotten up to go to the bathroom or buy concessions during any of them. The only one I remember is Jules Dassin's "He Who Must Die." But it seems like a good criteria for a powerful film.
posted by kestralwing at 1:58 PM on November 11, 2011 [2 favorites]
Wow, lots of variables.
If you do a search here about "people who cry while watching movies on the plane" you may also find that the watching varies by situation, and not just by person.
I know in the past, I'd watch a movie for 10 minutes, and if I found it cliched or boring, I'd turn it off. I find that as I grow older, I'm even more impatient. I think I'm hovering around the 5 minute mark now. Just way more stuff to do with my time.
posted by The ____ of Justice at 2:07 PM on November 11, 2011
If you do a search here about "people who cry while watching movies on the plane" you may also find that the watching varies by situation, and not just by person.
I know in the past, I'd watch a movie for 10 minutes, and if I found it cliched or boring, I'd turn it off. I find that as I grow older, I'm even more impatient. I think I'm hovering around the 5 minute mark now. Just way more stuff to do with my time.
posted by The ____ of Justice at 2:07 PM on November 11, 2011
There's one simple answer here: Don't let your friend tell you how to enjoy movies.
bubukaba gives a great history of the thinking about this. For myself, I'm a lot like you -- I have some pretty advanced comparative literature courses under my belt, and so I can't not look at things like story construction when I'm watching a movie. It's not a matter of how absorbing it is, really, although to be sure it's almost impossible to achieve the level of absorption one gets in a movie theater the way I watch most movies, on the big screen at home.
I just watched a pretty visceral example of film, Peckinpah's Straw Dogs. Did it reduce my enjoyment that I was keenly aware of the jumps between the cottage exteriors and the Twickenham interior set (and the dodges by the camera to disguise it)? Or to notice the symbolism of Dustin Hoffman picking up his broken eyeglasses at the end as a marker of his return to civilization, but with a damaged outlook? I don't think so, particularly. Clearly, I'm not bothered by "meta" thoughts while watching, and to some extent they indicate whether a movie is in fact worth watching.
An aside here is that some people think that this sort of thinking about the nuts and bolts is "picking apart" a movie, or criticizing it in the negative sense. Rather, I feel it's as much about teasing out a director's style as a writer's on the page.
Another by the by is that some experts have suggested that the film speed we use isn't sufficient for total absorption -- that our brain perceives the individual frames and is constantly jumping in and back out again because of this. Douglas Trumbull developed Showscan for this reason. I have been given to understand that digital projection ameliorates this somewhat, but I'm not sure how closely it's been studied.
posted by dhartung at 3:23 AM on November 12, 2011
bubukaba gives a great history of the thinking about this. For myself, I'm a lot like you -- I have some pretty advanced comparative literature courses under my belt, and so I can't not look at things like story construction when I'm watching a movie. It's not a matter of how absorbing it is, really, although to be sure it's almost impossible to achieve the level of absorption one gets in a movie theater the way I watch most movies, on the big screen at home.
I just watched a pretty visceral example of film, Peckinpah's Straw Dogs. Did it reduce my enjoyment that I was keenly aware of the jumps between the cottage exteriors and the Twickenham interior set (and the dodges by the camera to disguise it)? Or to notice the symbolism of Dustin Hoffman picking up his broken eyeglasses at the end as a marker of his return to civilization, but with a damaged outlook? I don't think so, particularly. Clearly, I'm not bothered by "meta" thoughts while watching, and to some extent they indicate whether a movie is in fact worth watching.
An aside here is that some people think that this sort of thinking about the nuts and bolts is "picking apart" a movie, or criticizing it in the negative sense. Rather, I feel it's as much about teasing out a director's style as a writer's on the page.
Another by the by is that some experts have suggested that the film speed we use isn't sufficient for total absorption -- that our brain perceives the individual frames and is constantly jumping in and back out again because of this. Douglas Trumbull developed Showscan for this reason. I have been given to understand that digital projection ameliorates this somewhat, but I'm not sure how closely it's been studied.
posted by dhartung at 3:23 AM on November 12, 2011
Response by poster: Thanks, everyone! Nice to see the variety. Yeah, I feel like during a good movie the levels of "engagement" and "meta" pleasantly coexist in my mind, mostly with "engagement" foregrounded but with the two levels varying back and forth. If I lose interest and start thinking about lunch, that's when the movie isn't working.
-harlequin- and others, do you think most directors would say that a movie I enjoyed where I was 10% meta-thinking to have more-or-less failed? Or would they consider that movie experience to have been 90% successful on an "audience" level, with an asterisk labeled "ok, plus 10% critical enjoyment, even though that was tangential to my point"? Although I imagine the answer would be "it depends on which director you ask..."
bubukaba: Awesome! Thanks for the bit of historical context; spectatorship and auterism are great leads. I know I preferred my "death of the author" professors to the few who taught literature more traditionally, so it's helpful to learn some more about the history of criticism here and fill in my gaps, and maybe figure out how to frame my debate with my friend in terms of different schools of thought.
posted by dreamyshade at 10:22 AM on November 12, 2011
-harlequin- and others, do you think most directors would say that a movie I enjoyed where I was 10% meta-thinking to have more-or-less failed? Or would they consider that movie experience to have been 90% successful on an "audience" level, with an asterisk labeled "ok, plus 10% critical enjoyment, even though that was tangential to my point"? Although I imagine the answer would be "it depends on which director you ask..."
bubukaba: Awesome! Thanks for the bit of historical context; spectatorship and auterism are great leads. I know I preferred my "death of the author" professors to the few who taught literature more traditionally, so it's helpful to learn some more about the history of criticism here and fill in my gaps, and maybe figure out how to frame my debate with my friend in terms of different schools of thought.
posted by dreamyshade at 10:22 AM on November 12, 2011
This thread is closed to new comments.
I guess I side with your friend.
posted by -harlequin- at 12:45 PM on November 11, 2011 [1 favorite]