Tendency to exaggerate
Aesthetic snobbery
Provocative style
Let’s be frank: you turned on Tarkovsky’s «Solaris» because everyone keeps insisting it’s genius. Twenty minutes have passed. The camera floats over a highway. It’s still floating. And still floating. You check your phone. You return to the screen – the camera is still floating. You feel something dying inside you. The film isn’t bad – you understand this intellectually. It’s simply that your brain, force-fed on the rapid-fire editing of Marvel and three-second videos, is screaming from boredom. Welcome to the club of those physically incapable of finishing a classic. There are no cookies here – but there will be a sarcastic breakdown of why this is happening.
Old movies really are slow. This isn’t an optical illusion or cultural snobbery. They are objectively, mathematically, editorially slower than modern ones. The average shot length in films of the fifties and sixties was about eleven seconds. By the nineties, it had shrunk to six. Now, in blockbusters, it’s two to three seconds, and in action flicks like «Bourne», it is less than two. That is, in the time Ingmar Bergman holds a close-up of Liv Ullmann’s face, a modern director manages to show a chase, an explosion, and someone’s existential angst in the reflection of a puddle.
But it isn’t just about the tech. The very understanding of what constitutes a «normal» storytelling speed has changed. Classic cinema grew out of theater and nineteenth-century literature, where the tempo was set differently. People were accustomed to a lack of haste, to pauses, to silence as a fully-fledged artistic device. Eisenstein could hold a shot of the stairs in «Battleship Potemkin» for as long as he deemed necessary to achieve an effect. Audiences endured it – not because they were smarter or more cultured, but because their perception hadn’t been trained for the rapid switching of visual information.
The modern viewer is a product of a completely different media environment. We grew up on MTV, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram Reels, where content changes every few seconds. Our brain has learned to process visual information at breakneck speed, demanding constant stimulation, a new angle, a new action. This isn’t degradation – it is adaptation. Simply an adaptation that makes old cinema feel like torture.
Let’s take something universally acknowledged as great – say, Hitchcock’s «Vertigo». A 1958 film, considered one of the best in history. The first ten minutes are practically a meditation. The camera leisurely follows the protagonist, Bernard Herrmann’s music unfurls languidly, and the dialogue flows at a natural pace. For a viewer in the fifties, this was normal. For a modern one, it is an endurance test. We wait for the «real» action to start, for the plot to lurch forward. But Hitchcock isn’t rushing. He builds the atmosphere, giving us time to inhabit the space, to feel the rhythm of San Francisco, to understand the hero’s internal state through visual language rather than expositional dialogue.
But here lies a paradox: what we call «slow» often turns out to be richer. Classic directors didn’t waste time – they used every second to create meaning. It’s just that this meaning was conveyed not through action, but through the composition of the frame, through light and shadow, through the actors’ micro-expressions, through symbolic details. Modern cinema often operates on the principle of «more is more»: more explosions, more plot twists, more visual effects. Old cinema worked on the principle of «less is more precise».
A classic example is Yasujirō Ozu’s «Tokyo Story». A film where practically nothing happens. Elderly parents visit their children, the children are too busy, the parents leave, one of them dies. That’s it. But Ozu shoots this with such visual rigor, with such long static shots, with such a meditative pause between scenes, that the modern viewer feels trapped in a Japanese tea house with no Wi-Fi. Yet, this is one of the most emotionally powerful films in history – if you are capable of tuning into its wavelength.
And this is where it gets interesting. Because the problem isn’t just that old films are slow. The problem is that we have forgotten how to watch slowly. Our attention is fragmented, our capacity for prolonged concentration atrophied. Studies show that the average human attention span has dropped from twelve seconds in 2000 to eight now. A goldfish, for reference, has nine seconds. We are literally losing to goldfish in a mindfulness marathon.
This doesn’t mean we are stupider. It means our brain has optimized for different tasks. We are better at multitasking, faster at processing information, more efficient at filtering noise. But the price for this is the inability to immerse ourselves in something deep and slow. Classic cinema demands that you slow down, turn off your internal timer, and stop waiting for the next dopamine hit. And we don’t know how.
Another factor is the shift in dramatic standards. The Hollywood three-act structure, which dominates now, demands that a significant plot twist occur every ten to fifteen minutes. This rule, derived by screenwriting gurus and cemented in textbooks, makes the narrative predictably dynamic. Old cinema didn’t work that way. There could be long scenes with no obvious plot progression – simply because the director wanted to show how the light falls on the actress’s face or how the wind rustles a curtain.
Fellini in «8½» allows himself scenes that exist solely for the sake of visual poetry. Antonioni in «The Eclipse» ends the film with a seven-minute montage of empty streets without a single character. This isn’t hack work and it isn’t snobbery – it is a different language of cinema, where what matters is not just the story, but how that story is told, and what emotions it evokes through purely cinematic means.
But let’s not be hypocritical. Some old films are indeed dragged out not for artistic reasons, but for technical ones. Before, there was no digital editing allowing a director to see a thousand variations of every scene and choose the perfect one. Editing was a physical process – cutting film, splicing, viewing. This limited experimentation. Furthermore, film distribution was more expensive, halls were smaller, and movies were often made long simply to justify the ticket price. So yes, sometimes directors simply couldn’t or didn’t want to cut the excess.
And yet, the main reason classics seem slow is us. Our perception has recalibrated. What was a normal tempo for viewers of the sixties is a frozen image for us. We watch Godard’s «Breathless», which in its time was revolutionarily fast and brash, and think: «God, when will something happen»?. Yet Godard broke all the rules, made jump cuts, tore scenes off mid-sentence, turning cinema into a nervous jazz rhythm. But even his revolution looks glacial compared to modern standards.
There is also the cultural context. Old films often require knowledge of the historical and social background, without which many scenes seem senselessly long. For example, Soviet cinema often featured long scenes of singing or reciting poetry – this was part of the cultural norm of that time, a method of expressing emotion. For a modern viewer, especially a Western one, this looks strange and dragged out. We don’t understand the code, we don’t feel the context, and instead of emotional resonance, we get boredom.
Interestingly, new generations of directors sometimes intentionally return to slow cinema. Paul Thomas Anderson, Terrence Malick, Kelly Reichardt, Apichatpong Weerasethakul – they all shoot films that are, by modern standards, almost obscenely slow. They hold long shots, minimize dialogue, and trust the visual language. And critics adore them, while the mass audience falls asleep in the theaters. This isn’t snobbery – it is an attempt to return the depth and contemplativeness to cinema that was lost in the race for the viewer’s attention.
The problem is that these directors work for a narrow audience that is ready to slow down. The mainstream flow of cinema is becoming faster. Netflix and other streaming platforms optimize content for maximum attention retention – this means even faster editing, even tighter dramaturgy, even less room to breathe. Algorithms track the moment viewers start to get bored and leave, and content adapts to prevent this. It is logical from a business standpoint, but it means the gap between old and new cinema will only grow.
So what should you do if you want to understand why everyone raves about Tarkovsky or Bergman, but you physically cannot sit for two hours before a screen without the urge to check your phone? First, admit that this is normal. Your brain isn’t broken – it’s just wired differently. Second, train your attention. Yes, it sounds banal, but it works. Start with short films, gradually increasing the difficulty. Watch without your phone, without pauses, without a second screen. Give yourself a chance to immerse.
Third, don’t force yourself to love what you don’t like. Cultural capital is good, but if «Andrei Rublev» doesn’t move you, it doesn’t make you an ignoramus. Perhaps a different language of cinema is closer to you. Or other art forms. Or maybe you don’t need any of that, and you will live a perfectly fine life never knowing who Ozu is. Art should enrich, not turn into a chore.
But if you still want to try – here is a little hack: watch old cinema like ASMR for the eyes. Don’t wait for explosions and twists. Perceive it as a meditation, as an opportunity to shut off the internal chatter and simply observe. Sometimes it works. Sometimes you suddenly understand why the long shot of the road in «Solaris» is actually genius – because it forces you to physically feel the duration of the hero’s journey, his detachment from the familiar world. This is impossible to convey with fast editing. It must be lived in real time.
There is one more aspect rarely spoken of: old cinema often requires a different level of visual literacy. Directors of the past worked under technical constraints – black and white film, static cameras, lack of CGI. They had to be inventive. They used composition, lighting, and depth of field as tools of storytelling. Modern cinema often relies on more direct methods – CGI, special effects, a dynamic camera. This isn’t worse, it’s just different. But to appreciate old cinema, one must learn to read its visual language.
Take Orson Welles’ «Citizen Kane». A 1941 film, and yes, it is slow in places. But every frame is compositional perfection. Welles uses deep focus to show multiple planes of action simultaneously. He uses low angles to give characters monumentality. He uses shadows and light to convey psychological states. If you watch the film simply as a story about a rich man who died unhappy – yes, it will be boring. But if you watch it as a textbook on film language – it is a revelation.
The problem is that modern viewers aren’t taught this. We are used to cinema entertaining us, not demanding effort. And that is also normal – cinema as mass art should be accessible. But the classics require a different approach. They require you to come prepared, to be ready to work. It is like the difference between pop and jazz. You can turn on the radio and enjoy a simple melody. Or you can listen to Coltrane and try to understand what he is doing with harmony and rhythm. Both approaches have a right to exist.
And lastly. Old films are slow also because they were made by people who had a different relationship with time. In the mid-twentieth century, life flowed differently. There was no internet, smartphones, or constant information noise. People could afford to sit and think. Directors made films for an audience that came to the cinema to immerse themselves in a story for two hours, not to distract themselves between checking Instagram. It was art for a different rhythm of life.
Now that rhythm has vanished. We live in a mode of constant acceleration, where every second counts, where idleness is perceived as a waste of time. And classic cinema, with its lack of haste and its contemplativeness, seems to us a luxury we cannot afford. But perhaps that is precisely why it is valuable. Because it reminds us that time can be not only saved but also lived. That sometimes it is worth stopping to watch how the light falls on a face, how the wind rustles the leaves, how a character silently looks out a window. Even if it takes a whole minute of screen time.
So yes, old films are slow. But the problem isn’t with them – the problem is with us. Or, more accurately, with the world we have built around ourselves. A world where speed is more important than depth, where stimulation is more important than meaning, where entertainment is more important than art. Classic cinema is a challenge to this world. A challenge that most of us lose, reaching for our phone at the fifteenth minute of yet another masterpiece.
But sometimes, very rarely, we win. And then we understand that slow cinema isn’t slow – it simply lives in a different time. A time we have lost, but to which, perhaps, it is worth returning. At least for a couple of hours. At least to try.
See you at the movies – if, of course, you survive until the credits. 🎬
