Watching a 7.5-Hour Movie in Theaters Made Me More Hopeful About Our Collective Brain Rot

There are a fewer ways to wrapper your caput astir watching a seven-and-a-half-hour movie.

When I was a kid I utilized to people clip successful “Roseannes,” wherever 30 minutes would adjacent 1 Roseanne—the tally clip of the sitcom. My inferior hockey games were 2 Roseannes. The thrust to my uncle’s was 12. A seven-and-a-half-hour movie is 15 Roseannes, oregon a formation from New York City to Paris successful an system spot with nary headrest. It’s a agelong clip to beryllium and ticker a movie, oregon bash anything, these days. But that didn’t halt 250-plus radical from doing it connected a caller early-spring Saturday successful Manhattan.

Sátántango, Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr’s 1994 miserabilist epic astir a failed Hungarian farming collective, clocks successful astatine 439 minutes. The centerpiece of Film astatine Lincoln Center’s Farewell to Béla Tarr programme this week (the manager died successful January, property 70), the movie is thing of a beatified rite for hardcore cinephiles. It is seldom screened, and seldom seen.

Sitting inactive and watching a black-and-white movie for 7.5 hours is the benignant of acquisition that’s successful progressively abbreviated supply. Despairing reports pass of the “attention-span crisis.” Parents are suing societal media giants—and winning—for stealing their kids’ quality to absorption with allegedly addictive short-form video scrolls. Film professors person lamented that, post-pandemic, their students person occupation sitting done adjacent regular-length movies. A full genre of memes has emerged celebrating the rotting of the encephalon itself. Netflix, allegedly, mandates that movies and TV shows repetition crippled points for the payment of half-watching viewers.

Sometimes I find myself having a pugnacious clip adjacent sitting done an occurrence of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills without reaching for my telephone truthful I tin look up hockey scores, google “Amanda Frances scams,” oregon conscionable swipe mindlessly.

“We’ve weakened the musculus of sustained attention,” says Film astatine Lincoln Center programmer Tyler Wilson. “Here’s an accidental to beryllium successful a room, with the expectations that I’ll stay, and not look astatine my phone, and not chit-chat. There’s a shared discipline.”

Sátántango is notable not conscionable for its length. Lots of things are long. Superhero blockbusters routinely propulsion 3 hours. Bingeing the latest streaming TV sensation has go the de facto mode of viewing. Tarr’s movie is not conscionable long. It feels long. Across its 439 minutes, determination are lone 171 shots, with an mean changeable of astir 2.5 minutes, astir 60 times the magnitude of the mean changeable successful a Hollywood film.

Sátántango offers an extended acquisition of duration itself. It’s a cardinal substance successful a subgenre of art-house movies sometimes termed “slow cinema.” (And it's not adjacent the longest entry. I erstwhile spent a full time watching Chinese manager Wang Bing’s 2018 doc Dead Souls, astir the survivors of a Mao-era “reeducation camp,” which runs much than 8 hours.) Where modern editing often aims to tighten the gait of time—making it look faster, oregon zippier—slow cinema prolongs it.

“Slow cinema is truly a cinema that makes you walk time,” says Lexi Turner, who teaches seminars connected dilatory cinema astatine Marymount Manhattan College. “There’s an facet of contemplation. And a request of patience.” Often employing nonprofessional actors and settings unfamiliar to occidental audiences, Turner says, these stock a definite dignity. By spending clip watching idiosyncratic trudge crossed a tract oregon the prima acceptable dilatory crossed the horizon, these filmmakers are stressing that these experiences and images are worthy of seizure and consideration.