Comment by prhn

> If I were a film professor today, hell even 20 years ago, I would not expect a modern film student to sit through that whole thing.

Our local cinematheque has just had a 70mm festival, where they of course screened Lawrence of Arabia. All screenings were sold out. My mom went to see another screening at the same time, and commented on how many young people were going to see Lawrence. The past couple of years there has been a strong uptick[1] here of younger people flocking to see older films.

[1]: https://www.nrk.no/kultur/analog-film-trender-blant-unge-1.1...

> And really, really boring and slow a lot of the time

If you only watch the story-driven scenes in Lawrence of Arabia, and skip the prolonged shots of the desert, you would miss out feeling the same vastness and heat Lawrence is feeling.

There is a limit to how much a film can make you think or feel. Films that reach the highest limits need "boring" voids in-between the primary scenes. These voids are not to ingest more, but to help digest what has been ingested in previous scenes, with subliminal scenes and silence that let the right thoughts and feelings grow.

The pacing is irrelevant in this context. As a student the main point of watching these movies is not entertainment.

Although I will say it's pretty amazing that someone that supposedly has an interest in film would not be able to watch The Conversation or an even slower film like 2001.

> And really, really boring and slow a lot of the time.

It's not boring on a giant display with the original 6-track mix playing just a tad too loud all around you. I've seen it in 70mm at the AFI in Silver Spring, MD; candy for the eyes and ears.

It would likely be boring if played at a quiet volume on a small display. This is because movies are, in part, spectacle. Cirque du Soleil would likely be boring too if viewed very, very far away.

>And really, really boring and slow a lot of the time.

At no point was it "boring"

> If I were a film professor today, hell even 20 years ago, I would not expect a modern film student to sit through that whole thing.

Sorry, but this to me sounds completely insane. We're not even talking about the general population here, but people who are ostensibly serious about the art and craft of film making. And the bar is being set at literally just watching the movie, and not even some obscure marathon of a film that takes a degree to be appreciated, but a major mass-released picture that has already been enjoyed by countless people.

In fairness, Lawrence's own book on which the movie is based, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, is a disjointed, rambling, and usually boring book. The high points are really good, but you slog through a lot to get there.

> Watch any film before 1980 and you'll start to see a pattern that the pacing and evolution of the narrative is generally very, very slow.

Star Wars, Enter the Dragon, Game of Death, Mad Max, and many Bond films are fun counterexamples.

I imagine a film student watching the baptism scene of Michael Corleone and thinking it is boring.

No you're wrong. It's not about the era. Matt Damon talked about this on the Joe Rogan podcast recently. He was asked by Netflix to create a big action sequence in the first 5 mins so that people on their phones would get hooked into watching the entire movie. He was also asked to mention the plot of the movie several times throughout the movie because people on their phones will tend to miss plot details and it helped keep them engaged.

This is not about how movies are paced, it's about the way phones have changed attention spans.

We're not talking about random people pulled off the street and asked to watch Lawrence of Arabia. We're talking about film students. So I don't see how your post is relevant at all. It's like excusing poor literature students because your brother in law struggled with Moby Dick.

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