A Film Fan Becomes A Time Consultant

I have a hard-disc recorder, and therefore a film collection approaching 500 films.

I have recently discovered that I can copy broadcast films recorded by me to my computer directly, and avoid keeping space consuming DVDs.

This also has the advantage of making all of my films available to me, and only leaves me with the problem of choice. Which is of course a considerable one.

Because I have a hard-disc recorder, I can also edit advertisements from my film collection, and watch films uninterrupted.

I almost said as they were intended, but in some respects of course this is to fail to recognize that films have always been a commodity, like almost everything else, and it has probably been true since the invention of the purpose built cinema that as much has been earned from the peripherals such as ice creams and popcorn as from the display of pictures.

I can just about remember the time when films were shown continuously in cinemas, so that you could pay your entry fee, and join the film at the point at which you arrived at the cinema, presumably staying as long as you are needed to catch the entire beginning.

This practice presumably came to an end as part of the process of cinemas becoming smarter places with more comfortable seats, and giving time between performances for the mess left by users to be cleaned up.

And possibly as part of the process of poverty being eradicated as a general component of everyday life.

I am sure that these open all day cinemas, just like public libraries, must have provided a useful place for the homeless to keep warm in a degree of comfort all day.

At a time when entry fees were considerably less than they are at present.

And thus cinema has developed as society has developed, and as I have become adept at removing adverts from my films, I have also begun to be aware of the way in which the length of films has developed over time.

Of course, broadcast films shown with adverts take up considerably more disc space and time duration than when edited.

Thus I would estimate that that the average film length is about two hours.

It used to be much less, perhaps in the days when we had much less time to spend watching them.

I would say that many of the older films that I have in my collection are as short as an hour and a half, and although this length is not by any means unusual in modern times, it is noticeable that average length has become around two hours.

I suspect that a film historian would be able to tell me that in earlier times, even shorter films were more common, and that this was the consequence of reel length, in the days when actual film was used as the means of displaying films.

Thus, films would be described as a six reeler or a four reeler, each reel containing about 10 minutes of film.

I suspect there are forgotten sociological reasons for film length, so that in the early days of film with an inexperienced audience, shorter films would have been what the audience could cope with.

As audiences became more sophisticated, and indeed as films became more sophisticated, longer films would have become more acceptable. And more saleable, because we must remember that film is a commodity, sold as much on its merits as much as its less obvious factors, such as the comfort of where they are shown.

And their duration must have been affected by the amount of time available to the audience.

I would imagine it would have been unthinkable to show something of the duration of the Lord Of The Rings to an audience from the 1950s, although I may well be wrong.

So for example the Wagner operas have been shown for many years and at the original theatre in Bayreuth, the seats for these five or six hour epic performances were famously hard on the bottom.

I have had the good fortune (as I consider it) to have been able to see Tristan And Isolde half a dozen times without having to pay, when I worked in the world of opera. Not as a singer, I hasten to add.

The intervals in such epic performances are of sufficient duration for the audience to eat a restaurant meal, often with associated restaurants. Such is the stamina required for such performances.

Interestingly, the average opera performance duration is about three hours, but for the operas of Puccini such as la Boehme it is closer to two hours.

And these were targeted in effect at a broader social audience, and represented as being more realistic in their context and style.

And perhaps shorter because the attention span of the intended audience was considered to be less than that for a three or four hour opera.

I suspect there may be commercial reasons for the subtle increase in length of the average film, such as the number of advertisement breaks when it is shown on commercial television.

But pay attention, we talk about our time being our own, but I sometimes wonder if we are not always being somehow manipulated in the way that we spend it.

And over time, as we spend money and time differently, business will always find ways of making us spend it to its advantage.