“– 300 meters of poetry! – 3,000 feet of Shakespeare!” Most of us film historians must be familiar with this line. This is how high-minded journalists used to mock cinema’s early attempts at literary adaptations. In the 1910s it was taken for granted that in the kingdom of poetry and arts there is no room for numbers and measures. Ironically, those who used to say this seem to forget that what makes poetry different from prose is its use of metric forms of speech, so feet and meters are as relevant to Shakespeare’s work as are Shakespeare’s tropes and Shakespeare’s characters.

In verse studies, scholars count syllables, feet and stresses; in film studies, we time shots. “If I use one word, I would have to say timing,” Chuck Norris said in an interview to ABC’s Nightline answering what attribute won him six karate world titles. “Timing I think was my key thing. I was able to figure out the timing to close the gap between my opponent and myself and move

What do we learn about films from calculating their average shot lengths? I once applied this method to compare the average shot length of Kuleshov’s films against the films made by his teacher Yevgenii Bauer, and when I put my data side by side with world-wide data collected by others, I felt my heart beat faster, for it turned out that between 1917 and 1918 the cutting tempo of Russian films

Are results we obtain using statistical data worth the time and patience one spends to obtain them? More and more so. Nowadays the process of calculating a film’s cutting rate can be made much faster and less labor-intensive than it used to be in the seventies and eighties. A statistician and computer scientist Gunārs Civjans, whose help I used in my work with Intolerance, has created an easy software program,

-Yuri Tsivian