Looking through the current cinema repertoire, one gets the impression that films are longer than ever. The Brutalist approaches four hours, but in this respect it represents a return to the past rather than a harbinger of revolution.
This text has been auto-translated from Polish.
This year's winner of several Golden Globes and an Oscar favorite is a monumental film, which also manifests itself in its length - viewers must prepare for a screening that lasts 215 minutes, and that's not including the quarter-hour intermission midway through the film. Some may question whether Brady Corbet needed nearly four hours to present his vision, as it certainly goes beyond the norm for Hollywood productions.
I won't go into a critical analysis of The Brutalist, one review has already appeared on the pages of Political Criticism, but I find the question of film length itself interesting, as it says a lot about the film industry as a whole, which has changed its approach to the duration of high-budget productions over the years.
From short clips to multi-hour epics
If you look at the history of cinematography, you will notice that for the first few decades the duration of moving pictures only increased. The earliest feature films, such as Journey to the Moon, lasted several minutes, and works from the early days of Chaplin's career would be more in line with Youtube clips than modern full-length productions. However, as technology developed and audiences grew, films lasted longer and longer, until by the 1960s the average for the best-known Hollywood titles reached nearly two hours.
There were works that significantly inflated it - as late as 1939, Gone With the Wind, which lasted 221 minutes, was released, later joined by such mega-productions as Ben Hur (212 minutes) and Cleopatra (251 minutes). Some of them had overtures and antecedents rather associated with theater, and mere intermissions as now in Brutalist were not unusual for cinema of the era. On the other side of the ocean was Lawrence of Arabia, which, with a running time of 222 minutes since 1963, holds the title of the longest film with an Oscar in the main category - Corbet's work will not surpass it in this regard, provided it receives the statuette for Best Picture at the upcoming awards. It will also be shorter than Wajda's The Ashes (226 minutes), not to mention the full version of Potop .
In the same year as T.E. Lawrence's book, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's Lampart, a grand tale of the Sicilian aristocracy in the era of Italian unification, was screened. Luchino Visconti's adaptation was so monumental and detailed (the director was even supposed to keep an eye on the historical consistency of the actors' costume buttons) that it brought the studio to the brink of bankruptcy and forced it to abandon film production.Lampedart is notable in that it illustrates well the risks involved in making such long films - they are necessarily more expensive and even a high artistic level may not guarantee commercial success. It was also characteristic in that it lived to see several versions with different durations.
Cuts, cuts, cuts
At the Cannes Film Festival, Visconti's work (which won the Palme d'Or, by the way) was 195 minutes long. Screenings in Italian cinemas were ten minutes shorter, and in other European countries as much as 24 minutes were removed from Lampart - all this was trumped by the American version, trimmed to just 161 minutes, despite the director's fierce protests. The result was a relatively long film anyway (more than two and a half hours long), but without many important scenes, which weighed on the negative reception of the audience. So why such a decision by the distributors?
A long film means, among other things, that it can be shown fewer times in the cinema in a single day, and it was in the interest of cinema chains and, indirectly, studios to have as many screenings as possible, especially since ticket prices are not conditioned by screening time. At some point, there was additionally a widespread opinion that extremely long productions were less attractive to audiences, especially in the US market. This fostered cinematic uniformity around the producers' preferred 90-120 minute range in the following decades of the 20th century.
For this reason, for example, the great epic A long time ago in America, which was originally intended to run as long as 269 minutes, was brutally shredded in 1984. Sergio Leone, under pressure from distributors, trimmed the film to 229 minutes and in such a version European audiences could see it, but in the US, after further cuts, only 139 minutes were left - about this installment, shorter by as much as an hour and a half, the director said it was no longer his film. There are plenty of similar stories, and many pictures suffered either during distribution or while still in the filming stage, when accountants put the brakes on artists' overly ambitious pursuits for fear of cost. Fortunately, however, such approaches are becoming a thing of the past.
The return of several-hour films?
Comparing the top-rated films on Letterboxd by year, it comes out that, compared to the 1970s, productions from the current decade are longer by an average of 10 minutes, which is rather little, but if juxtaposed with the 1980s, the difference is already 17 minutes or 15 percent. There is also a clear upward trend in the number of films lasting more than two hours, while those with a duration of at least two and a half hours are also increasing, even if it is difficult to speak of a steady increase due to the small sample.
Paradoxically, the film industry may have been helped here by competition with other media, especially streaming services. When a potential viewer has thousands of titles at his or her fingertips at any time, and cinemas are in crisis, pushing as many screenings as possible each day no longer makes sense for producers and distributors. If they want to attract people to movie theaters, they need to offer an experience that cannot be easily replicated on the couch in front of the TV or in bed with a laptop. This, in turn, favors productions that are either exceptionally spectacular or deeply engaging with wide-ranging stories like The Brutalist. On top of this, another streaming phenomenon - namely binge-watching, or watching multiple episodes of a series in a row - has shown that viewers aren't so afraid of staying in front of the screen for long periods of time at all.
Another factor is that directors are in a stronger position - it's hard to imagine that the works of today's best-known names are being shredded against their will, as used to happen repeatedly. This is good news, first of all, for the viewer, who will receive a final product that is in line with the artists' intentions, not a rotten compromise forced by the studios or distributors.
Of course, a movie is not always worth sitting through for several hours (Irish comes to mind), but in that case no one will forbid you to leave the theater before the closing credits. The bottom line is that the risk of hurting a great picture by cutting it short by force is less than in the past, which is a very good evolution in world cinematography. Personally, I'm waiting for an Oscar film to break the more than sixty-year record of Lawrence of Arabia - it won't happen this year, regardless of the winner, but maybe next year?
