Tag: movies

How does the aspect ration affect viewers?

After almost a year, I was teaching students again. I was lucky that the Department of Theater and Film Studies gave me the opportunity to teach almost anything, so I was able to talk about my current research. Specifically, I decided to discuss with students the significance of the frame of a moving image.

Looking back, I don’t think I was ever particularly interested in the frame of a film. Of course, I was aware of pan-and-scan editing of films for television and VHS, but since I had been using the internet since childhood, it didn’t bother me that much. It was more of an trivia from history of cinema.

That changed, of course, with vertical short videos. If we look at the statistics, today’s TikTok users in Czechia watch an average of over an hour of videos in vertical format every day. That’s hundreds and hundreds of scenes, short stories, or just recordings of something.

In other words, today the frame of the film image is an essential topic. And that’s why I wanted to devote a seminar to it.

We started with a discussion of literature (Eisenstein: The Dynamic Square and Somaini: The Screen as “Battleground”: Eisenstein’s “Dynamic Square” and the Plasticity of the Projection Format) to raise awareness that the horizontal shape of the film frame was not always a given. The students then worked in groups to analyze several films that creatively manipulate the aspect ratio of the image. These included The Door in the Wall (1956), The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), X (2022), films by Ola Røyseland, and a selection of TikTok videos.

The culmination of the course was for students to work in small groups to shoot their own short film in which they tried to use the frame to influence the audience. To test whether they succeeded in their intention or not, each group had to write a hypothesis and email it to me before the final screening. In the discussion after the screening, I then tried to find out whether the authors’ intention was successful or not.

In my opinion, the course was a success. It seemed to me that the students used the knowledge they had gained from reading and analysis in their own work. And the resulting films turned out very well, even though the students only had one day to make them.

With their permission, I am presenting the films here.

Team 1 (Březnická, Raiskaia, Karim)

The students achieved something unprecedented in this video. Their intention was, of course, for the colored rectangles to draw the viewers’ attention. However, I noticed that after the first rectangle appeared relatively far from the center of the image, I tended to look around the edges of the image to see if there were any other colored rectangles. I had the impression that the students had managed to break the center bias that movie viewers naturally gravitate toward and that filmmakers take advantage of.

Team 2 (Podlaha, Hampeisová, Prajslerová, Ryšanková)

It was probably the most ambitious film in the class. Those of you who watched the video on your smartphone—did you turn your phone around? If so, you fulfilled the filmmakers’ intention.

In the discussion after the screening, I repeatedly heard that it was the moment when the character was upside down that made them turn their phones. Whatever the moment, it shows us that watching audiovisual content on a smartphone can count and deliberately elicit active audience engagement that would have been unthinkable in a cinema.

Team 3 (Mührová, Tkadlecová, Moskvina)

The students attempted to assign different perceptions of time to different aspect ratios. Can you guess which aspect ration was supposed to represent hecticness? Probably yes. In any case, I assume that they did not rely solely on the aspect ratio, but also supported the state of being busy with movement, colors, and tripling the videos.

Team 4 (Salvadori, Mičola, Romsy)

In this film, the students devoted themselves to narration more than any other group. Working with the frame therefore does not come to the fore as it does in other pieces; it does not draw attention to itself. The frame of the image strives to be an organic part of the whole.

Team 5 (Cvrkalová, Kalianková, Kožárová )

The last group tried to create an impression of paranoia and surveillance in the audience. Judging by the reaction of their classmates, they were the only ones who didn’t succeed. I wondered why that was. The reason could be the short length of the film or the violation of certain editing techniques (e.g., the absence of a POV shot after a close-up of the face). Despite the fact that the students in team 5 did not succeed in fulfilling their intention, it was fascinating to see how they approached the task.

November 18, 2025

aspect ratio, cinema, film, film studies, filmmaking, movies, vertical frame
ZIP-SCENE Conference II.

The second day of the conference had one clear highlight for me—Ola Røyseland‘s presentation. His contribution was called Frame/less, and I was surprised by how close his thoughts were to mine. Ola is a filmmaker who focuses on shooting short films in his doctoral thesis. He draws on two assumptions: 1. we watch films because they convey emotions to us through narration, 2. VR is associated with a lack of emotion and weak narration. His goal is to identify which formal techniques are suitable for storytelling in VR. To achieve this, he shoots each of his films in two different formats—classic film and 180 degrees. He then tests his films on audiences to find out what works and what doesn’t.

Olovy’s films are short, entertaining, and experiment with things such as narrative perspective and point of view.

I was thrilled by Ola’s presentation. He demonstrated exactly the kind of thinking that interests me in filmmakers and managed to formulate it as a research problem that he addresses in his work. I sincerely hope that this was not my last encounter with Ola.

I was also intrigued by Lukáš Hejtmánek‘s presentation on multisensory perception. Although it is relatively distant from my topic, I enjoyed the playfulness with which they carried out their experiment. In short, it was about verifying what sensory stimuli need to be simulated in order for a visit to the forest in VR to have a therapeutic effect. Surprisingly, artificial grass underfoot and aroma lamps are not necessary. Apparently, visual and auditory stimuli are enough.

The next day, I also realized that another great contributions by Oliver Kobián and Pavel Srp (yesterday) had something in common: both studied under Lukáš Hejtmánek.

I also found Marika Hedemyr‘s contribution extremely inspiring. She talked about her mixed reality project. At one point, she emphasized the importance of pauses in directing the attention of people participating in her project. She deliberately placed pauses after significant sentences in the audio guide’s speech (e.g., questions). She determined the length of the pauses intuitively, but not at first glance, and from what she showed us, the pauses lasted from a few to tens of seconds.

And that was the ZIP-Scene Conference for me. I don’t know if the organizers will want to invite me back next year, but I will definitely want to come.

October 25, 2025

180 degrees, film, film form, movies, multisensory, VR
Bára Erben (2025) The Body in the Film

A few years ago, when I joined Palacký University as an assistant professor, I started to include more and more cognitive theories in my teaching. After five years I have to say that I feel a positive response from the students. Every year there are several of them who want to explore film audiences and their perception of cinema. And this semester, the best student thesis so far was submitted: The Body in the Film (original title: Tělo ve filmu).

I’ve selected a few of the most compelling findings from the thesis, which I’d like to briefly share here. They offer fascinating insights into how composition, gender, and viewer attention interact.

Gendered perception of male nudity: In a scene featuring male masturbation from the film Její tělo, male viewers paid significantly less attention to the nude male body than female viewers did (pp. 25–26).

Gendered perception of nudity in centre and periphery: During the ritual sex scene in Midsommer, women focused primarily on the central action of the narrative, while men’s attention was often drawn to exposed female genitalia (pp. 27–28).

Fluctuating focus in Chyby: When nudity is shown, viewers’ attention shifts back and forth between the characters’ faces and the exposed female breasts. These shifts are driven by changes in dramatic tension and the unfolding dialogue – especially while revealing the characters’ past (pp. 27–28).

Focused attention in Poor Things: A combination of lens choice, actor movement, and color palette effectively guides viewers to concentrate solely on the actors, largely ignoring the surrounding space (pp. 29–30).

Visual suppression in Její tělo: In a visually distinct static shot from the film Její tělo, careful use of composition, low lighting, and actor performance causes viewers to almost completely disregard a striking neon-blue sign and a red light source in the background—even though they are visually prominent (pp. 31–32).

Gendered gaze dynamics: Across various scenes, the analysis found that male viewers tended to fixate longer on sexualized body parts, while female viewers perceived scenes more holistically—often focusing on the emotional and relational dynamics between characters.

Involuntary attention: One of the most striking findings is that viewers look at nudity even when they consciously try not to. Their gaze reveals an unconscious attention pattern that contradicts their self-reports (p. 54).

July 7, 2025

art, eye-tracking, film, movies, nudity
Tim Smith: Exploring the Cognitive Foundations of Cinematic Continuity (May 15, 2025)

On Thursday, May 15, 2025, we welcomed Tim Smith from the University of the Arts in London to CoSTAR National Lab. Tim was kind enough to accept the invitation from Adam Ganz and me.

In his lecture, he talked about Continuity Editing Rules and why we, as viewers, enjoy watching (mainly) Hollywood movies so much. He also discussed how filmmakers control the audience’s attention. According to Tim Smith, filmmakers are brilliant intuitive psychologists. Without scientific knowledge of human cognition, they are able to very successfully control where viewers look in films and how they perceive them. He illustrated this with a range of data from his experiments.

I have been familiar with Tim’s work for many years. I mention several of his experiments and findings to my student in cognitive film theory classes. However, two things never occurred to me.

1) Tim refers to almost no film theorists. The exceptions are Janet Staiger, Kristin Thompson, and David Bordwell. He finds much more inspiration in the work of cognitive psychologists (J. J. Gibson, Daniel Simons, Joseph Anderson), neuroscientists (Uri Hasson), and especially filmmakers, whom he quotes extensively (Spielberg, Tarantino, Dmytrik, Eisenstein).

2) How much he loves film. He is genuinely fascinated by film and has a vast knowledge and passion for cinema.

I had the opportunity to talk to Tim before and after the lecture, and I was pleased by his vision of an ever closer connection between filmmakers and cognitive film studies. However, we also briefly touched on the topic of TikTok as a competitor to Cinematic Continuity in the battle for audience attention. So perhaps the main question is what form film will take in the future.

Exploring the Cognitive Foundations of Cinematic Continuity

Professor Tim Smith (University of the Arts London)

Thursday 15th May, 16:00

SHILLING-LT (Shilling building, Royal Holloway)

Filmmakers tell stories by selecting and emphasizing key details of an audiovisual scene through editing, cinematography and sound design. Such edited sequences instantaneously transport the viewer through space and time in ways that are physically impossible and, due to their divergence from reality should pose problems for viewer comprehension. However, filmmakers believe they have at their disposal a suite of editing techniques, known as the Continuity Editing Rules that make the viewing of film effortless. In this talk I will present a series of behavioural and eye tracking experiments investigating the cognitive foundations of film perception and provide a theoretical and methodological framework for extending filmmaker insights into audience experiences of film.

Tim J. Smith BSc. PhD. is Professor of Cognitive Data Science in the Creative Computing Institute, University of the Arts London and head of the Cognition in Naturalistic Environments (CINE) Lab. He applies empirical, computational, neuroscientific and developmental methods to questions of Media Cognition, including real-time audience experience analysis via eye tracking. He has published widely on the subject both in Psychology and Media journals and his research has informed media practices through collaborations with Dreamworks Animation, BBC, Channel 4, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.Currently he is leading the UKRI cross-council multi-site research project, Animating Minds: Triangulating the age-appropriate impact of children’s media.

May 19, 2025

art, attention, cinema, cognition, Continuity Editing, film, movies, perception, tiktok
Interview with screenwriter Meir Lubor Dohnal

In the last few weeks – while waiting for the ethics committee’s approval – I have been finishing a book about the Czech screenwriter Meir Lubor Dohnal. An unknown filmmaker to most people, but one who had an incredibly interesting and colourful life. Just to name a few – a Holocaust survivor, a member of the new wave of Czechoslovak cinema, politically persecuted, a signatory of Charter 77, he made it as a screenwriter even in German exile, films based on his screenplays have competed at major festivals around the world.

The book I am finishing is partly a collection of essays and partly a collection of interviews. Togga will be the publisher and the book will be released during the summer of 2025.

Talking to my colleagues at Royal Holloway, I realised that none of them will probably be able to read the book because it will be published in Czech. So I thought I’d take a bit of theour conversation and translate it as a sample.

So below are two excerpts that relate to videos on smartphones and artificial intelligence. But through these topics, Meir Lubor Dohnal gives an insight into how he thinks about writing for film, and where he sees the power of cinema.

—

Aren’t you worried that you are training filmmakers for a time when cinemas will function more like museums?

I don’t think that’s going to happen. I believe that people will still go to see new films and filmmakers will discover innovative techniques suitable for the big screen. I recently saw Corsage, which is the type of film that people won’t want to watch on their mobile phones.

How important are technological developments for screenwriting students? Do you address with them the difference in writing for cinema or for TV and streaming platforms?

We distinguish between the internet, TV, or cinema. As a viewer, though, I’m increasingly aware that technological advances are blurring the distinctions between ways of presenting film. After seven years, I’m buying a new computer, and the visual quality is such that it almost doesn’t matter if I’m sitting in the back row of the theater or at the computer. The biggest difference is in the sound. That’s where computers and televisions still lag behind cinemas, and without good sound, the film is amputated.

Do your students watch movies more in the cinema or on the computer or even on a smartphone?

They prefer the cinema, but more often on the smartphone. I wouldn’t watch a movie that way myself, but it’s a way for them to see the classics. And if they have a guide to what to look out for, they’ll get it. For them, these are movies for old-timers anyway. They wouldn’t find Bergman and Pasolini as interesting today as we did 60 years ago. They don’t marvel half a century later at formal innovation. It’s enough for them to understand that in Pasolini, communist and Catholic thought, conservative desire and radical subversion, were at odds. As a document of important works of cinematic history, the phone can work just fine. But not as a tool for discovering things. Students go to the cinema to see contemporary films, just as we do.

Could you imagine writing a film for a smartphone?

Well, yes, I could, but I wouldn’t do it in the same way as I would for the wide screen. I saw my former student Zdeněk Jiráský at work on I Don’t Love You Anymore. It’s about two teenagers who run away from home all the way to Romania and film each other on their smartphones. I know, it’s a different case, but I want to use it to show that smartphones can be conceived as something that filmmakers use in the construction of the story and that individualizes the film. Phones make it possible to connect different environments by jumping quickly into another space. The smartphone has become almost an organic part of the body of our contemporaries. A character without a phone would be strange. Life without it is like the life of a hermit. Thanks to technology, young people will perceive the world around them differently than I did. Their experience shaped by technology will allow new ways of identifying with the character. In spite of this, I think the experience of cinema screening is unmistakable. We’re stacked up in the dark like we’re in a spaceship, staring together at something from another world. I would have missed that magical atmosphere, and I’m sure it’s not just me. I don’t think the cinema is in danger of disappearing. At most it will be seen as just one possible way of showing films.

(…)

Do you think AI will help writers with their work or take it away?

Of course I’m thinking about it. It will certainly change the work of screenwriters, but I don’t think writers won’t be needed. I can’t imagine AI being able to make art. I believe it can write a script, I believe a film based on such a script can be not only consumable but interesting or even attractive. But it would probably be far from what I understand as the art of filmmaking. The individuality of the filmmaker, which is strange and unique, can break the rules. Whereas artificial intelligence will always follow the rules. Even if we program it to break the rules, it will do so according to the rules. Of course, such work is also needed in screenwriting, say in advertising. I can imagine that AI can even produce a commercial film better than a human, which will have a high audience. If you want to hit the audience’s taste, thanks to AI you can have a script ready in an hour.

But it will be a script that follows the rules.

Of course it will. To write a good script, you have to know the rules. You have to know the craft. That’s how you deal with writing problems. The AI will give you, say, ten options to choose from. But when we talk about film as art, we’re mostly talking about uniqueness and originality. And the only originality is in us and in our consciousness. Of course, we can look at people through statistics and see that we all have the same problems. But the solution to those problems is completely individual. A good screenwriter can identify with a character based on his or her own experience and thus make his or her work original. At the same time, it gives the viewer a chance to identify with the character as well. If this is done, the writer gets into a direct dialogue with the viewer because the character connects them. When the viewer then leaves the cinema, something is going on in their head that they would not otherwise have had the chance to experience. That’s what’s exciting about it, and there’s no substitute for the artist.

The originality has to come from the screenwriter?

It can be the director’s. I see the writer and director as such a complex personality. If someone has a director’s vision, they can make art out of a phone book. So theoretically, a robot could replace a screenwriter if the director is dominant enough.

But you’re obviously not worried about that.

We can speculate all sorts of things. Like artificial intelligence destroying us. But I don’t think that’s going to happen, which is why I don’t think AI is dangerous. I’m going to digress. I think there is a system of information exchange and correction in the universe. Man is not alone in this. Scientists today can observe the post-big bang state and subatomic particles. Something happens according to rules and something seemingly erratic, but even the chaotic is subject to harmony. I deliberately don’t say goal because I’m not a fatalist and I don’t think it happens over time. Harmony – the unity of everything – is just the basic rule within which we are free to move. Everything from elementary particles to human beings has some degree of freedom, where to move, what to bump into. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, it’s random. Sometimes we hit harmony and sometimes we don’t. When we don’t, it falls off. And when it does, it cleans everything up, lights everything up. But I don’t want to get into religious matters. What I’m trying to say is that just as our bodies are changing, our consciousness is evolving. Just as the evolution of our species is changing the importance of certain organs, like the appendix, so too is the way we think about the world transforming. And the question is whether this will take place over tens of thousands of years, or faster.

And how does artificial intelligence relate to this?

Humans have the gift of awareness and reflection. I think art is a form of cognition, like science. They have a similar meaning for humans. They make us more insightful, more rational, more aware of our limits and possibilities. When you know the limits of your own consciousness, you think about how to overcome them, which is related to the human desire for knowledge. Artificial intelligence can be an aid in this, just as the computer and other inventions have been in the past. It will speed up some of the thought processes, calculations, become our collaborator, and we will think together. I see it as an opportunity rather than a threat. If anything is a danger to mankind, it is man.

May 1, 2025

ai, cinema, film, movies, screenwriting, writing
Is TikTok really as fast as we think?
I often encounter the opinion that TikTok is fast. Frankly, I’ve never understood it. I could describe TikTok in a number of words, but speed would not be one of them. Maybe the problem is what we mean by speed.

The last time I came across the idea was in Berenike Jung’s “Travelling Sounds, Embodied Responses: Aesthetic Reflections on TikTok” from the anthology Traveling Music Videos edited by my colleague Tomáš Jirsa. Berenike Jung describes TikTok as follows:

“the videos’ short length creates an accelerated, hypnotic pace of viewing. The videos are themselves often accelerated and/or stuttering, edited to a speed that puts chaos cinema in the rearview mirror and further normalizes jump cuts as the rule for online videos”

I identify speed in three senses in the quote:
1. the fast pace caused by the short length of the videos
2. the acceleration of videos
3. the use of jump-cuts to eliminate shots where nothing important is happening
In at least two of these, it is something we have known for decades, so it hardly surprises any viewers today. Anyone who has ever watched a silent movie has encountered video acceleration (the reason for this is the different standard of projection speed expressed in terms of the number of frames of film stock per second of projection).

Similarly, the jump-cut cannot be considered anything groundbreaking. It is associated in film history books with Godard’s A bout de souffle (1960), but even that was not the first use. David Bordwell wrote an article on the jump-cut in 1984 (Wide Angle, vol. 6, no. 1) where he points out that the jump-cut had been used since the early era. In my notes, I found uses of the jump-cut in, for example, the Finnish film Valkoinen peura (1952, Erik Blomberg).

The remarkable speed of TikTok can therefore perhaps only be explained by the short length of the videos. And while we could find examples from the past (commercial breaks on TV, blocks of trailers and ads in cinemas before the screening starts, blocks of video clips on TV and YouTube), TikTok has at least contributed to shortening videos to a new level.

But the list of possible understandings of what makes TiKTok fast is not, in my opinion, complete. Leaving aside the contextual aspects of video production speed and TikTok’s speed of expansion. The impression of TikTok’s speed could still be caused by at least two things: 1. the average shot length of a TikTok video, 2. the amount of information conveyed through spoken word or text. Given complexity of the combination of spoken word, text in videos, text in subtitles, and text in the app interface, I’ll leave point 2 for another time. In the following lines, I will focus on the average length of a shot.

Average shot length is, in my opinion, a better indicator of speed than simply video length. Try to imagine a hypothetical social network where users could upload 30 second long videos, but only in one take. I dare to doubt that we would consider such a social network fast in any sense. We might even find it slow and boring. Especially compared to the US film and series, where the average shot length is between 3 and 5 seconds.

We can see this for ourselves thanks to Radomir Douglas Kokeš, who has been collecting data for a long time and publishing it on his blog. From his database, I was able to select a sample of films produced in the USA between 2014 and 2024 and calculate the variance of average shot lengths. I had 430 films and episodes in my sample. Sure, it’s not all that’s been produced, but better data just aren’t available.

The graph clearly shows that although the average shot length varies, it oscillates around similar values (average of averages).

Now let’s see what the average shot length of videos on TikTok is. Admittedly, I don’t have as large a database as Douglas. I collected the data in an unsystematic way one afternoon by sitting down at my desk with TikTok on my smartphone, turning on screen recording, and recording one video from start to finish for about 25 minutes. I then uploaded the file from my phone to my computer and took the classic shot length measurements I’m used to. For each video, I noted the lentg and the number of takes, from which I got the average shot length. In total, there were 19 videos in my sample (including two commercials, two split-screen videos, and five videos that were more like slideshow photographs).

The average shot length of videos on TikTok is longer than the average shot length of American movies. While the median is similar, the boundaries for the third and fourth quartiles are shifted by seconds.

Of course, one could argue that this is due to the sample, and that if I had measured on a different day or in someone else’s recommendation algorithm, I would have gotten different numbers. Sure.

On the other hand, there are arguments that the higher average shot length for TikTok videos may not be accidental. One of the reactions of our eye movement to editing in film is to reorient our gaze to the center of the screen. Research shows that viewers of portrait format videos (which is the format on TikTok) exhibit a weaker central bias than viewers of landscape videos (the format of movies and TV shows). I don’t know what videos specifically the measurements were taken on, but the weaker central bias could indicate a smaller number of cuts after which our gaze turns to the center.

Anyway, I want to repeat the measurements in some time to make sure. For now, I’ll go with the measured data and therefore…

In terms of average shot length, TikTok is simply slower than American movies and TV shows. It is not a fundamental difference, but it is there. When you think about it, it’s not really surprising. On TikTok, many of the videos are shot in one take (I had 6 videos in one take in my sample). These videos will inevitably slow down the TikTok experience and increase the average shot length. But in a way, they are the simplest thing a creator can do and therefore the most typical.

Well, to summarize. Some viewers seem to get the impression of speed from the TikTok videos. This impression is so intense that it has made its way (in a form of intuitive claims) in to academic papers. The problem is that we don’t know how to quantify this impression. For now, the only measurable value is the short duration of the videos, but I don’t think that is relevant evidence of the impression of speed. Especially when the average shot length is higher for TikTok than for the average American film. I therefore put more hope in the amount of information (text + speech) conveyed in the videos, but I’ll leave that for another time.
March 3, 2025

analysis, ASL, editing, film, movies, social-media, style, tiktok
Which screen is actually the second?

It’s evening. I’m not going out, but I don’t feel like reading, so I’m watching a movie on an unnamed streaming platform. When choosing, I prefer movies I’ve already seen. Why? So I don’t feel guilty about looking at my phone every now and then.

A not insignificant number of viewers are reportedly thinking along similar lines to this scenario. They watch a film unfocused, or while doing something else. In another post I addressed casual viewing and today I want to look at the changing ways of viewing audiovisual content from the perspective of watching multiple screens simultaneously.

There are several interesting studies on the topic in which researchers have looked at the viewing practice of watching multiple screens simultaneously.

Holmes, Josephson, and Carney. 2012. Visual attention to television programs with a second-screen application. In Proceedings of the Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications (ETRA ’12). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 397–400.

Brown, Evans, Jay, Glancy, Jones, and Harper. 2014. HCI over multiple screens. In CHI ’14 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’14). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 665–674.

Lohmüller, Eiermann, Zeitlhöfler, and Wolff. 2019. Attention Guidance in Second Screen Applications. In Proceedings of Mensch und Computer 2019 (MuC ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 179–187.

All of the studies are impressive because they experimentally test how viewers behave. They use an eye-tracker (mobile or stationary) and think about setting to resemble a living room as much as possible and a laboratory as little as possible. In other words, they make sure that the experiment reflects the natural environment.

The results are then very compelling and show that viewers are primarily watching TV and paying less attention to the tablet/phone (by a ratio of 2:1 to 5:1).

The problem is that all these experiments are formulated from start to finish in such a way that it is clearly established which screen is “first” and which is “second”. Even the choice of what is played on the second screen is only complementary to what is played on the first screen. For all three studies, this approach is understandable. Their intent was to offer data to make multi-screen viewing consistent, which could then be used by media companies to develop applications. But if we are interested in the relationship between audiovisual and spectator behaviour, we necessarily feel that something has been left out. They left aside the fact that there is a competition for our attention in the media market.

I don’t know anyone who would say they watched TikTok last night and occasionally glanced at what was happening on Netflix. That’s not how we talk about leisure time. Statistics, meanwhile, show that the average U.S. adult in 2024 watched Netflix for only 3.7 minutes longer per day than TikTok (62.1 vs 58.4 minutes). Is that enough of a difference to determine which screen is hierarchically first and second? I’d say no.

It may well be that the attention paid to movies and TikTok is different when the division between first and second screen is abolished. And it’s also quite possible that some movies are less successful at attracting attention (though studies suggest that this is not the case).

I would like to build on the three studies mentioned and think about how to implement experiments in a way that reflects the battle of the screens. To start with, users will need to break the hierarchy of the first and second screens and let them be free.

February 24, 2025

attention, movies, tiktok, two-screens
In a World Where TikTok Killed the Cinema Long Ago

This week and next week I will be attending an AI-focused bootcamp. Thanks to Farshad Einabadi, who is the tutor, it is an incredible experience. One of the most beneficial events in a long time.

I don’t want to go into details because I don’t understand the AI issues. The course is aimed at beginners and includes programming in Python. In this way, Farshad is showing us how AI works and how we can use AI to create.

The first part of the course was about Stable Diffusion and image generation. Below you can see examples of the four images I generated. These are edits of my favorite photos (+ 1 drawing) from the history of cinema. I had them edited to depict a world where films were replaced by TikTok a long time ago.

Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein edits his latest TikTok video.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder shoots his new TikTok video.

A camera ride during the filming of the TikTok version of Diamonds of the Night (1964).

And finally, a slightly depressing shot of an empty cinema and two characters watching a mobile phone on screen.

January 24, 2025

ai, film history, filmmakers, movies, tiktok
The Early Era of TikTok

When I first installed TikTok a few years ago, I thought to myself that this is something people must have experienced in the early 20th century with film. A new form of audio-visual entertainment that resembles its predecessors, but with slightly different possibilities. Creators have tried to work with the medium with varying degrees of success. The audience succumbs to its charms. Intellectuals are confused.

Like any historical analogy, of course, this one is inaccurate, but I want to use it to illustrate a research desire that I thought I would have no luck fulfilling. I ask the reader, then, to understand this analogy of TikTok and early cinema more as an evocation of my feelings about the subject of research. It reminded me of something I experienced 16 years ago.

When I was a film studies student reading the antology of new film history (Nová filmová historie: antologie současného myšlení o dějinách kinematografie a audiovizuální kultury. 2004), I was fascinated by the texts of Thomas Elsaesser, Tom Gunning, and Charles Musser on early cinema. These were translations of older texts into Czech.

I was fascinated by Thomas Elsaesser’s texts because of the way they managed to overturn my perception of the past. Suddenly, I didn’t understand the films of Lumiere and Porter through the eyes of a film studies student in 2009, but I realised that it was necessary to accept the period context and try to understand the films within it. These were not films at the beginning of cinema history. On the contrary, they were the result of history. From a research point of view, this meant studying literature and archival sources, which accompanied me for the rest of my studies. It was only later that I realised that I didn’t have to try to reconstruct the contexts of the past, and that’s how I got into current audiovisual culture.

I have always enjoyed reading Tom Gunning’s texts for their myth-busting power. Specifically with the text ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)credulous Spectator’ (Art And Text 34, Spring 1989 and many other times), it still fascinates me how he has managed to break out of the decades-old notion of naive spectators. The paradox is that the idea of naivety is still firmly rooted in us, which makes us naive ourselves. Otherwise, we could not think that short videos on the internet are “killing” or “eating” the brains of our children.

I like Charles Musser’s text ‘The Nickelodeon Era Begins: Establishing the Framework for Hollywood’s Mode of Representation’ (in Early Cinema. Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. T. Elsaesser. 1990) today more out of nostalgia. In terms of the formulation of the research problem and the arguments, I view it very critically today, but I used to give it to students to read despite the difficulties. Its greatest strength, I believe, is in its ability to convey an almost romantic image of film projection in the early era of cinema. However, Musser doesn’t simplify the situation, but instead points out the little details that show the complexity of the early years of film. One of the things that Musser has been focusing on is the composition of programs from different types of film and non-film performances. My colleague Chris Hogg talked about TikTok in a similar way when we spoke in the fall.

After reading these texts, I have always been a little sad that I will never experience the early era of cinema again. It’s not that the present is qualitatively different in terms of new film history. It was that early cinema was shown in the aforementioned texts as a stage of creative phase, where filmmakers explored a new medium, audiences were getting used to it, and together, from the bottom up, cinema was being made. Today, of course, it is similar with films and TV series. I just kind of get the impression that we all know what we’re doing (though maybe that’s what Porter thought, too).

TikTok changed that. Suddenly I saw a platform where people with no prior filmmaking or artistic training were staging funny sketches. I saw a platform where different types of performances alternated from trivia and commentary to musical performances to self-help videos. I immediately realized that this must have been how our ancestors must have felt in the early 20th century when they came to nickelodeon. They understood something, they didn’t understand something else, but they were actually having fun. It wasn’t artistic entertainment, but everyone was fascinated. Just like TikTok today.

January 20, 2025

cinema, early cinema, film, movie, movies, tiktok
Will Talvin (2025) Casual Viewing: Why Netflix looks like that. n+1, issue 49.

I read an article today that is closely related to an idea for an experiment I had. Adam Ganz pointed me to the text and some of the ideas from the article were mentioned by my colleague Šimon Kulík.

The author of the article tries to argue that most of the movies on Netflix look like “garbage”, but that no one really cares because viewers only half-watch Netflix (have it running in the background) or don’t watch it at all.

There are two passages in the article that I find noteworthy. First, a summary of observations on the style and narrative of movies on Netflix. It would certainly be worth examining these further and validating them through formal analysis.

The other notable idea of the article – expressed only implicitly – is that Netflix is not where it is because of its work with data. That has only come with time. Netflix’s greatest asset is that it can exploit human nature and weaknesses. If in the beginning it was irresistible to rent a DVD without having to return it by the next day (or else one paid a fine), today it is convenient to play Netflix in the background while doing something else.

But I don’t think this necessarily makes Netflix movies look like “garbage” as the article suggests. Certainly that’s one possibility, if we look at the matter from the filmmakers’ point of view. But what if we look at Netflix from the viewers’ point of view?

In the past, I’ve repeatedly asked my students how they watch movies, and they’ve admitted to turning on Netflix while watching TikTok. (This two-screen viewing should be the subject of the experiment mentioned at the beginning of this blog.)

From the perspective of the Casual Viewing article, the cinematic quality of movies on Netflix is deteriorating because viewers aren’t paying attention to them anyway. But then how is it possible that they pay attention to even more garbage on TikTok? (Personally, I wouldn’t say it’s garbage, but if we apply the same criteria to videos on TikTok as we do to Netflix, the conclusion is clear.) How is it possible that we are turning away from low-quality movies on streaming platforms to even lower-quality videos on social media? This kind of viewer behavior doesn’t make sense to me.

A possible reason is that viewers choose to watch audiovisual content on two screens in parallel for other reasons. The reason may be our desire to absorb information easily, it may be different types of viewing (a background story on TV and a different type of information on a phone). Or there may be other reasons. But I would be careful about saying that Netflix may be deteriorating in quality just because no one is watching it. In fact, we may be witnessing Netflix and TikTok succeeding in exposing our weakness without us even realizing it.

January 15, 2025

movies, netflix, streaming, two-screens