Art, 70's Movies, and How We Experience Time
Art can’t escape time.
The power of any narrative form lies in its manipulation of time. Some artists use it as a tool, some comment on it, others attempt to escape it, but every work of art interacts with the concept of time, whether consciously or not.
Photography takes a moment, a fraction of a fraction of time, and turns it into an object. Music takes the most immediate signal of time’s passage — the heartbeat — and replicates it, thereby controlling it, speeding or slowing our bodies’ markers of time. It’s no accident that our readiest and strongest complement for a comedian is that they have a great sense of timing.
So to talk about art is to talk about time, but that gets difficult quickly, because the ways we have of measuring it rarely do justice to the ways we inhabit it. The terms we use to discuss time — days, hours, moments, eras, evenings, eons, Tuesdays, now — are not, themselves, time. They are just different ways of talking about time. They’re not even containers for time, or tape measures for it. They’re more similar to constellations: attempts to stencil sense onto small markers of an infinite distance. Because how we experience time isn’t an immutable law of nature. It’s a way of thinking about reality. It differs by era, culture, and person. It changes as the structures we use to shape it change.
Measured time as a force in the average person’s life was an accidental co-invention of the technology developed during the industrial revolution, especially the railway. Entire nations abruptly had to run by clocks with suddenly relevant minute hands. If they didn’t, there were personal, economic, and even mortal consequences. The effect was a radical reshaping of human society and the human mind’s perception of reality. While the world was becoming a smaller, more accessible unit, days were split and segmented, becoming mathematical units rather than an immersion in a series of nows.
This change in understanding the temporal progression of our experienced reality was nothing less than a change in what it was to be human. Our behavior changed, and people at the time noticed.
Do [people] not talk and think faster in the depot than they did in the stage office?
-Henry David Thoreau
And some recognized the stress of this time-conscious rewiring of the human mind.
The perfection of clocks and the invention of watches have something to do with modern nervousness, since they compel us to be on time, and excite the habit of looking to see the exact moment, so as not to be late for trains or appointments. Before the general use of these instruments of precision in time, there was a wider margin for all appointments; a longer period was required and prepared for, especially in traveling — coaches of the olden period were not expected to start like steamers or trains, on the instant — men judged of the time by probabilities, by looking at the sun, and needed not, as a rule, to be nervous about the loss of a moment, and had incomparably fewer experiences wherein a delay of a few moments might destroy the hopes of a lifetime.
-GM Beard
Our experience of reality has only grown more time-conscious since the early days of the railroad. But that initial, immense shift shows that time is a mental filter for processing our experiences, and in that sense is not fixed. Time is what we think it is, and our entire lives are shaped by that thought.
Our own experience of the flexibility of time teaches us that this is true. We know, at some level, no matter how deeply we’ve learned to commodify our days, that an “hour” is a poor measure for the amount of life that each one contains. We know that the speed of time can separate itself from the devices that claim to measure it. And we know that it’s because during different hours we think of time differently, or not at all.
The flexibility of time is why art’s relationship to time is important. Because that which shapes our understanding of time shapes time itself.
Some art comments on time overtly and directly:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
-TS Eliot, Burnt Norton (Four Quartets)Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
-William Shakespeare, MacBeth
Other art comments on time while using it as a tool. Time — or a new way of portraying subjects over time — became an obsession of the pop artist David Hockney. He contemplated time as both an ingredient and subject of paintings, photographs, and films. A celebrated painter first, he didn’t initially appreciate photography because of its fragmented relationship with time.
The main aspect was, it seemed to me, this lack of time in the photograph. I’d become very, very aware of this frozen moment that was very unreal to me. Photographs didn’t really have life in the way a drawing or painting did. And I realized it couldn’t, because of what it is. Compared to Rembrandt looking at himself for hour and hours, scrutinizing his face, putting all these hours into the picture you’re going to look at, naturally there’s many more hours there than you can even give it. A photograph is the other way around — it’s a fraction of a second, frozen. The moment you’ve looked at it for even four seconds, you’ve looked at it more than the camera did.
But as he explored photography’s potential, he created a form of photo-collage he called “Joiners.” Joiners were assemblies of moments that achieved a sense of time.
Time was appearing in the picture. And, because of it, space. Now, the space is an illusion, I was aware of that, but the time is not an illusion. It is real and accounted for in the number of pictures. You know it took time to take them, wait for them, and put them down.
Some art merely serves to stretch time for the reader, the watcher, the viewer. It allows us to experience expanded time by benefit of the time it contains built into it. Every work of art contains, as Hockney alluded, an offering of time. The time the artist spent laboring on it, thinking of it, walking away from it and returning, agonizing and rejoicing over it, is now a part of it. If a book takes ten years to write (as most of the best ones do) and you can read ten such books in a year, you’ve absorbed one hundred years of wisdom and struggle and soul. Art is distilling our time and offering it, shrunk and packaged, to lengthen the days of others.
No art form controls its viewer’s experience of time as thoroughly as film. Its length is set, and the experience of time in the film is dictated by the filmmakers’ choices. If you — the viewer — look away and then look back at your own pace, you have disengaged. As long as you are engaged, your time and the filmmakers’ time are one. This makes film’s ability to comment on time both limited and limitless.
Film…had unprecedented capacity to manipulate time and movement by artificially slowing it down, speeding it up, stopping it, making it go backwards, inserting or truncating time gaps or jumps, and performing seemingly impossible feats of time trickery with flash backs or flash forwards. In these ways, ‘cinematic time’ became independent of ‘real time’. Film also embodied its own fundamental paradox — that it created ‘movement’ by frames showing ‘stopped time.’
-Philip McCouat, Journal of Art in Society
Because film is, essentially, an exercise in experiencing time, people’s taste in movies unsurprisingly lines up with their taste in time. And people often think the movies I like are boring. They’re not always wrong. But it’s a comment I’ve heard often enough that I started wondering why. That’s how this essay started. Maybe at first it was defensive, but it quickly became an exploration: why are the slow-burn 70s dramas I love so…slow? Why does a differently controlled experience of time strike different people differently?
It’s widely accepted that modern entertainment and device use alter the way we pay attention, but I want to examine what that means.
It’s not simply that we don’t know how to cope with boredom, although that’s been discussed thoroughly. Access to other devices, other apps, other articles and discussions, and ads on top of ads, all function not just to shorten, but to segment, our attention, and therefore our time, into smaller and smaller units. This micro-segmenting makes us hyper aware of time. Each unit of attention, of thought, is so brief, we often don’t realize its effect on the flow of our days. But chopping time, instead of sustaining it, is a powerful manipulator of reality. No one knows this better than filmmakers.
Since time is fluid, it’s different for every person, and especially different for every generation. Just as the nature of time changed for the train generation, it’s changing for the digital generation, and not least because of the way art is changing, aided by new ways of creating. I’m not bewailing this — it’s the nature of time, just as it’s the nature of art and technology, to be changed by everyone that touches it. But in any era, the concept of time is a taskmaster, and understanding that our lived time is a malleable experience is a way to be free of it.
The aptly named cognitive scientist James Cutting has extensively studied the evolution of filmmakers’ tools of attention, especially pace (shot length and motion) and the use of light and color.
His 2011 study with Kaitlin L Brunick, Jordan E DeLong, Catalina Iricinschi, and Ayse Candan, Quicker, Faster, Darker: Changes in Hollywood Film Over 75 Years, demonstrates exhaustively that: “First, shot lengths have gotten shorter, a trend also reported by others. Second, contemporary films have more motion and movement than earlier films.”
Not only do films cut more, but more is happening in each shot. They go on:
We view this increasing inverse correlation of motion and shot length as an amplifying effect. That is, short shots likely increase viewer response to films and film segments, forcing observer eye movements to quickly reevaluate each new visual depiction and increasing heart rate and other bodily responses.
Cutting et al argue that the evolution of film pacing has occurred in order to more efficiently match natural patterns of human attention.
So it’s understandable that we’ve sped up our films. It matches our inclinations. But our instinct has always been to bound ourselves within fragmented time rather than surrender to deep timeless attention. This is important because time is the enemy of attention. Time, by its nature, is about the before and the after, the thief of the now.
Time is negative. The moments when we’ve felt alive, felt the experience of joy or connection or even cleansing sorrow, came in the absence of conscious time.
The most marvelous day of all when I completely forgot who I was where I was or the time a day just with my pants rolled up above my knees wading in the creek rearranging the rocks…and finally at sundown with bent head …looking up from this work of an entire day, from noon till sundown, amazed to see where I was, who I was, what I’d done.
-Jack Kerouac, Big Sur
David Hockney understood this, and he understood how art can shape time, and free us from it.
What is stress? It’s worrying about the future. Art is now.
-David Hockney
Let’s examine two bank robberies. Specifically, the moments right before shit gets real.
In this minute of film, we encounter a team of bank robbers getting out of their car, preparing to rob a bank. It’s slow, it’s tense, and it’s almost painfully simple.
The use of tracking shots means there’s only three cuts in this selection, and they’re all interior/exterior cuts. We’re experiencing the passage of time at the exact same pace the characters do.
Compare that to the (still relatively slow-paced) rendition of a similar moment in 2017’s Baby Driver:
In this minute, we get fifteen cuts, as opposed to three. And even though this scene plays out in relatively real time (cuts aren’t used to elide events), the experience of this minute is very different because of how much more segmented it is.
Comparing Lumet’s famously contemplative pacing with Wright’s high-octane style might not be completely fair. But it’s a strong illustration.
For a more direct comparison, let’s look at a classic alongside its more recent (and excellent) update/sequel. The final minute before the final bell of the climactic fight.
Ten cuts. Wide, staggering shots. Exhaustion. One cutaway to audience members. This is a grueling minute of film that above all highlights how stressfully long a minute in the boxing ring is.
This is probably a more exciting fight scene. Ryan Coogler doesn’t waste a single one of these sixty seconds. And there’s a lot going on: there are 37 cuts in this minute of film. Besides the brutal fight shots, we cut to Adonis Creed’s mother, girlfriend, and trainer. We cut to the other fighter’s trainer. We cut to the crowd.
In a way, our reacting is being done for us. This is filmmaking at breakneck speed, but it also serves to stretch time by showing simultaneous moments, like reactions, consecutively. We don’t experience this fight in the same sort of time the fighters do. Rather, we experience flashes of it.
By allowing events to play out uninterrupted, older movies affirmed a present-moment focus on time, an uninterrupted flow. The pace of physical reality was good enough for those filmmakers, as it is for a few slow-paced rebels working today.
The “Double Slit Experiment” — an observation of the behavior of light as it passes through two small slits — started as a simple refutation of Issac Newton’s Corpuscular Theory of Light. In the years since, it’s become an experiment in how reality functions when measured.
Many scientists, including Werner Heisenberg (of Uncertainty Principle fame), interpreted the increasingly bizarre results of the Double Slit Experiment to mean that reality doesn’t exist until it’s observed. I like to use this as a metaphor for time.
Time doesn’t exist until we measure it. Until we seek markers that denote now from then. Until we split it into smaller and smaller units of attention that scream of time’s passing.
The films of Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky are more like environments than entertainments. It’s often said they’re too long, but that’s missing the point: He uses length and depth to slow us down, to edge us out of the velocity of our lives, to enter a zone of reverie and meditation. When he allows a sequence to continue for what seems like an unreasonable length, we have a choice. We can be bored, or we can use the interlude as an opportunity to consolidate what has gone before, and process it in terms of our own reflections.
-Roger Ebert, reviewing Solaris
Our real lives should allow us the same: consolidation, reflection, forgetting about the passing of time.
Art can train us to expect that, and to welcome it.
Further Reading/Watching:
- Philip McCouuat: Changing Concepts of Time
- Excerpt from The South Bank Show (1978): David Hockney Joiners
- VashiVisuals: Average Shot Lengths in the films of popular directors
- Jeffrey Moro, Attack and Dethrone Time
