Who turned out the lights? How the decade's final month changed cinema for ever |

"For Haynes, the problem extends beyond simply the size of the screen: it is also a matter of plenitude. “I was watching TCM [the film channel Turner Classic Movies] recently – which is one of the reasons to stay alive in the world – but I had it in the streaming version where you can pick from all the movies at once. What’s strange is that I missed actually having it on cable and being presented with a single movie at a time, and enjoying that happenstance of a film just being on: you didn’t select it, you didn’t have to sit there and think: ‘What should I watch?’ You feel a deeper connection to things when they’re not totally being administered by your every whim. And, in a weird way, I think it changes desire. When everything is available at once, we don’t want it any more.”

Russell Brandom, the 35-year-old policy editor at the technology site the Verge, insists that younger audiences don’t think that way. “For young people, the idea of sitting and watching one thing for two hours is just not culturally central,” he explains. “The 20-year-olds of this world are more invested in YouTube and TikTok and that more immediate, less ‘produced’ kind of media. There is a lot more competition for their attention these days and film is not really a medium that is well suited to that. If you’re doing film right, you want some silence, some sense of time stretching out: that’s part of the art of film, and I do think it’s harder to create space for that in the modern attention economy.”"

article by Ryan Gilbey

Who turned out the lights? How the decade's final month changed cinema for ever | Film | The Guardian