I have some tentative comments on the original article Attention and Hollywood Films, by James Cutting, Jordan DeLong, and Christine Nothelfer. I don’t see any point in discussing the notices it has attracted in various newspapers, journals, and web sites.
Cutting, DeLong and Nothelfer do not quite claim, as others have done for them, that they have found the formula for box office success in the cinema, which is just as well, because their test sample could not possibly justify such a claim. The sample they are working with comprises 10 films from each of 15 years taken at five year intervals from 1935 to 2005. The sixty films from 1980 to 2005 that they use are said to be “…among the highest grossing of their year…”, but I very much doubt that they are really the Top Ten box office champs for the years concerned. For films chosen from before 1980, they “…were among those with the largest number of viewer ratings on the IMDb.” It should be obvious to anybody acquainted with this source that such a choice can have very little real relationship with box office takings in that distant year in which these films were released. Most importantly, if the desire was to test the hypothesis that the formula that the researchers arrived at was necessary for box office success, it is essential that the sample of highly successful films be compared with another sample of highly unsuccessful films, which should be shown to lack the formula. This was not done, as is so often the case in hypothesis testing in the softer sciences.
Turning to the meat of their work, I think that the regularities they are detecting are a product of two features of film construction, one basic, and one historical.
The first, which I have commented on long ago in my books, and also in the piece The Numbers Speak, which is on the Cinemetrics website as an extract from my Moving Into Pictures, under articles by Barry Salt (get the preferred PDF form), is that the basic units of dramatic structure of films, which are the scenes, are put together in the film script so that the dramatic nature of
You can see this illustrated in the films on the Cinemetrics database with the new moving average tool that has just been added. (I suggest starting with the 20 shot setting, but you can try other ranges.) You will see that the moving average trace usually has a wave-like shape, and that the peaks and troughs of it are often of approximately equal height and depth. As well, there is a
The historical part of the phenomenon is the increase in the cutting rate since the nineteen-forties. This is illustrated by a graph covering the ASLs of 7,448 American films made between 1930 and 2006, which is in the new 3rd. edition of my Film Style and Technology on page 378, and also in “The Shape of 1959” in The New Review of Film and Television Studies (Vol. 7, No. 4, 2009).
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The result of this speeding up is constriction in the range of shot lengths used in films, as illustrated by the following two graphs of the shot length distributions for Catherine the Great (1934)
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And for Derailed (2002).
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In Catherine the Great about 12% of the shots are less than three seconds long, while in Derailed, about 90% of the shots are less than three seconds, and nearly 50% of the shots are less than one second. Hence successive shots in Derailed are much more likely to be nearly the same length.
This is shown by the difference between the autocorrelation coefficients of lag 1 for the two films. For Catherine the Great it is 0.1164, while for Derailed it is 0.1976. That is, about 80% bigger. (The autocorrelation coefficient of lag 1 measures the correlation between the lengths of any shot and the next shot, taken in succession down the length of the film.)
James Cutting and his collaborators work in terms of a series of more complicated elaborations of autocorrelation, which I will not discuss in detail. The quantities they use are the Autoregressive index AR and its modified form, mAR.
They assert that mAR is not an artefact of the decreases in mean shot length (ASL) over the last 50 years. This seems dubious, since I find that for their sample, the correlation of mAR with ASL is slightly better (r = 0.49) than its correlation with release year (r = 0.43), for the films under consideration.
The other path of their investigation is through the spectral decomposition of the series of shot lengths in the films using Fourier analysis, and they point out that this is mathematically related to the results of their autoregression analysis, and hence gives similar results.
Cutting, DeLong and Nothelfer give the impression that the editor of a film has complete freedom to make a shot any length they like. This is certainly not the case in general, as anyone who has edited a film knows. In particular, for dialogue scenes, the length of the speeches has a strong influence on shot length. Even when there are cutaways to reaction shots in the middle of a speech,
If audiences could be satisfied with nothing but action movies that have NOTHING but action in them, then the ASL could get shorter than 1.5 seconds, where it has halted at present, and the various shot length correlations studied by Cutting et al. could attain the maximum all the time, but I don’t think this is likely.
There are some further doubts about the postulated fundamental connection between the (hypothetical) basic psychological processes of attention, and film shot lengths. One alternative view of the matter is that the film audience is primarily attending to the succession of things represented in the film scenes, not the cuts between the shots. These cuts were certainly intended by film-makers to be “invisible” up until recent times. The counter-example to
Finally, as all Cinemetricians should know, the method used by Cutting, DeLong and Nothelfer to get frame-accurate shots lengths is not efficient, with their work times being 15 to 36 hours per film. Using a NLE, and putting some sort of mark on each cut to get the shot lengths takes me (and no doubt others) only 3 to 12 hours per film, depending on the number of shots in it.
All the above is obviously far from being the last word on this work by Cutting et al., but what they have done is certainly usefully provocative.
Barry Salt