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Plan 9 From Outer Space
A Brain Scan Won't Reveal A Movie's Success
'Solved: The mathematics of the Hollywood Blockbuster' (New Scientist) details an experiment conducted by psychologist, James Cutting as he attempts to measure a movie's success by looking at the duration of the shots.
So James has got a load of top grossing Hollywood movies, timed the shots and discovered a pattern that is in harmony with our brain waves. He suggests that it's this mathematical editing of the film that is the key to holding an audience's attention.
According to Mr Cutting, the human brain's attention span, when it comes to movies, ebbs and flows on a predictable wave-length. This can, in turn, be measured and manipulated by trimming dull movies down to the optimum tempo.
"James analyzed 150 Hollywood movies and found that the more recent they were, the more closely their shot lengths tended to follow a mathematical pattern that also describes human attention spans... He found that later films were more likely to obey the 1/f law than earlier ones. But he stresses that it isn't just fast-paced action films like Die Hard II that follow 1/f. Rather, the important thing is having shots of similar length that recur in a regular pattern throughout a film."
Well bang goes any respect I had for James and his research. Of all the examples of a decent movie, they pick Die Hard 2! But seriously...
To say that having shots of a similar length that recur in a regular pattern is the mathematical solution to a movie's success is to ignore virtually every rule established by cinema that's been proven to work time and time again. It is precisely the opposite of what Cutting suggests that makes a film engaging.
We're all aware that Editors cut to a 'pace'. But look at any Horror film worth its salt and you'll see that shot duration not only varies, but is integral to manipulating the emotions and expectations of the viewer. How many times have you noticed that after a big scare, you found yourself saying, "I knew something was wrong when the camera held on that front door for just that little bit too long."?
Cinema has expanded its technical vocabulary and we have learnt to read it at a increasingly sophisticated level. Yes, it could be that our brain waves were always on some mystical tempo that Filmmakers and Editors have finally cracked. Or it could simply be, and I think it's more likely, that our brains have evolved as Cinema has evolved, resulting in the observable synchronicity.
French-New-Wave pushed the envelope in the 60's with more experimental editing techniques, most notably the jump-cut. Now this is a perfect example of an edit that can elicit an emotional response and engage the audience but has nothing to do with duration. The jump-cut is about the shot and the preceding/proceeding image. Often the edit results in actors or objects impossibly leaping across the screen or large passages of time instantly evaporating. These techniques were alien to audiences and somewhat confusing. Now the jump-cut has become commonplace and we're all familiar with the idea of a morning routine montage where our protagonist jumps from brushing their teeth to eating toast to slamming the front door. But our brains and our understading of the cinematic language have changed to accomodate this particular effect.
A tense scene in Michael Mann's thriller, The Insider, sees Al Pacino and Russell Crowe sat opposite each other in a restaurant. At it's most tense moment, Mann breaks a cinematic convention known as the 180 degree rule and places the camera on either side of the horizontal axis. Observe Pacino and Crowe seemingly flipping positions with every edit, it results in a rather unnerving and engaging moment. The pacing is regular; what holds our attention is the irregular breaking of the 180 degree 'line'.
We have an amazing ability to detect these subtleties in many aspects of film. The edits/cuts are only a small part of a multitude of layers that contribute to holding the viewer's attention. My attention is often held by the sound design and music, for example.
But the key to a film's success is not in the pacing of the edits, it is in the story. Perhaps Raging Bull would not have been considered a masterpiece if it wasn't for Thelma Schoomaker's editing, but even the great Thelma couldn't save Basic Instinct 2.
One need only ask a Producer or Director what the most important aspect to consider is and they will all tell you; the script. Before one even thinks about shot pacing, one is able to make a very educated guess as to how engaging a film will be by reading the screenplay.
No brain-scan will ever be able to explain why The Departed is a stunning piece of cinema and Righteous Kill is a stunning piece of shit. One must analyze the script, the story, the acting, cinematography, editing, sound design, soundtrack, costume, makeup, originality...
A trailer for a new action film, Takers, has been released and by all accounts, it adheres to all the latest editing techniques, pacing and ultra slick technical rendering that the modern brain desires. Except it will never be successful because, it's evident that it's cheap knock-off of the movie Heat.
And if James Cutting were to sit and watch Heat and time the shots, he'd still fail, because the reason for Heat's success is not shot pacing, it's a combination of great writing and Deniro and Pacino's onscreen debut collaboration. The irony being that the reason for Righteous Kill's failure is the expectation that fans of Heat had for it.
So much of a movie's success is context. The Blaire Witch Project wasn't a huge success because it had a mathematical formula; it was successful because it had a homemade quality, it was original in what it refrained from showing us. Not to mention, it was one of the first movies to make use of the web as a tool for viral marketing and promoting myths and 'true stories' surrounding the film's plot. These factors are what made it a success with audiences, not some incredible Fibonacci'esque montage manipulating our cerebral cortex.
Sadly, as much as I love the two subjects, I am not sure whether, at least on this topic, Science and Art should be mixed.
About the Author
I write for fun. My blog can be found here: www.therantingboy.blogspot.com
