I have just watched, by chance, ten seconds of a film released this past year. I count an impressive eight shots in this meager interval and immediately think of Andrei Tarkovsky. According to this great artist, the substance of cinema is time, and the filmmaker’s job is to print time on the screen. According to this prudent vision of the seventh art, a work that madly superimposes eight shots in ten seconds is anything but art. It seems to me that cinema, like music, is on its knees before an audience incapable of concentration. The work—and perhaps work is no longer the appropriate word—needs to stimulate, all the time, the adrenaline, needs to deliver instant emotion and generate expectation for a new emotion in the next second, otherwise attention simply disperses, and the audience starts to yawn. No doubt this is a generational trait, and it seems increasingly difficult to shake off this terrible modern reality that resembles this unbearable bombardment of shots.a
Eight Shots in Ten Seconds!
