FILMMAKER BLOG  Monday, January 08, 2007
A.D.D.I.
Christopher Stack, who is finishing his film An Exercise in Vigilance and who replied on the Sundance post below, blogs over at Deep Structure. I just checked out his blog for the first time and like this post from back in August on what Stack calls ADDI:ADDI-compliant.
it's a term a friend and i coined to describe films that don't bore me.
add (attention deficit disorder for those of you living under a rock) + intelligence.
the film not only has to move quickly, but it has to do so with intelligence, not wasting time on explaining the obvious or even the not-so-obvious. quick editing and moving pictures aren't enough, i have to be engaged intellectually as well. preferably both intellectually and emotionally. however i can deal with intellectual stimulation without the emotional, but not vice-versa.
combine that standard with idiosyncratic likes and dislikes and you end up with a person with a fairly low enjoyment rate of most entertainment. however, it never ceases to amaze me how severely films fail this personal certification.
for instance, today i tried to watch 'cache.' (don't worry, no spoilers here).
i tried watching the film for the first 20 minutes or so. and definitely there are cultural differences (french films have no problem showing real conversations, no matter how boring), but really, the set-up here could have been done in *much* less time.
after the first twenty minutes my add kicked in and i switched into addi-compensation mode: watching on 2x fast-forward with subtitles on. i'd go faster, but subtitles on my dvd player only display up to 2x. anything after that they don't bother (like i can't read that fast?? please).
even that wasn't enough. it's not just the slow pace that doesn't make sense in this film. it's the character choices. for example, for no reason the main character doesn't want to tell his wife what he's thinking. there's a whole scene in which she berates him for this. who cares? it's a dumb choice, frustrating to watch and doesn't do anything for the story, and it's a lame device that sets up the main character to visit a location alone, instead of with help as his wife suggests.
eventually i progressed to just jumping foward to the next indexed scene after watching the current one briefly, and then gave up a litte after the one hour mark....
the bottom line is information. im sure it's not just me. we've all grown up in a media-saturated environment where information is instantaneous and omnipresent. playing videos games, using the web, watching tv, films, music videos, commercials and comic books; we know how to absorb visual information incredibly quickly. so if you linger too long on a scene or show me superfluous detail, im already bored.
plus, we've seen every story numerous times. it's hard to do something original, but if you can't do something original at least do it quickly!
...i guess then that it's no surprise my favorite film of last year was syrianna. definitely ADDI-compliant!
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/08/2007 06:19:00 PM
Comments (7)
Maybe you guys should watch fewer video games and stop fast forwarding through subtitled films. You might reap the benefits of a movie with a slow buildup and savor the cummulative effect of a great and important film like Caché. Turn off your phone, your ipod and whatever sensory overload you insist upon and just watch the movie. Check your A.D.D. at the door (probably too much to ask). You might learn something. Not all great things have to move swiftly.
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posted by @ 1/09/2007 10:03 AM
Harumph!
Well, as someone whose favorite filmmakers are Tarkovsky and Antonioni and who has sat through both "Satantango" and "Berlin Alexanderplatz" in single screenings, I think I can still appreciate what Stack posted. I love slow-moving cinema, but I am increasingly finding it very difficult to watch it on video at home. I need the theatrical experience to adjust my own rhythms to this type of movie.
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posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/09/2007 3:26 PM
hey thanks for the mention scott! and i think you make an excellent point about the theatrical experience versus home video (though as home theatres get more elaborate will that ameliorate the effect?)
anon - it's true that not all things have to move swiftly, but it's also true that slow moving things aren't automatically great.
although i'd love to like more films (or more accurately have there be more films i like), im happy with my a.d.d.* :)
i spent years trying to like movies i "should" because they were classics, but i've decided that's a losing cause. who knows perhaps i'll create a niche for myself as a an addi-compliant filmmaker. ;)
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posted by deepstructure @ 1/09/2007 10:44 PM
As a friend emailed me, "The smaller the screen, the faster the cuts..."
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posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/09/2007 11:33 PM
While I think the term is amusing, at the most, I would be fine with it except it sounds a little too much like doublespeak. The term is provocative, and I appreciate its point. But I fear the day that the work gets naturalized in the film jargon; the day a producer will tell me "It's got too little ADDI". It's true that the ADD+I makes for a swift 'n smart viewing experience, but the pitfalls are that tight, domino effect editing and screenwriting will amuse me the duration of the film, but I leave the film and the memory withers: They never had time to make the viewer sink in the story or its ideas, all they did was making my mind perform gymnastics, amused by the those movies' mechanical symmetry and narrative singsong. There's a discussion in David Bordwell's blog about the average duration of shots (A.D.S, quite similar to ADD+I); he evidences the decline, thoughout the decades, of Scorsese's average shot length. He's clearly more "ADDI compliant" now, but are his films necessarily better? They might be more watchable, but they don't have that vaporous quality that makes his early work so enthralling. The generous lengths of many shots, featured in his best work, has surely something to do with their overall quality as movies. There's more stuff on the long take in Girish's blog.
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posted by Miljenko @ 1/10/2007 12:36 PM
i finally decided to write a post in response to this discussion.
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posted by @ 8/07/2007 7:50 AM
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