Watching a 7.5-Hour Movie in Theaters Made Me More Hopeful About Our Collective Brain Rot

There are a few ways to wrap your head around watching a seven-and-a-half-hour movie. When I was a kid I used to mark time in “Roseannes,” where 30 minutes would equal one Roseanne—the run time of the sitcom. A seven-and-a-half-hour movie is 15 Roseannes, or a flight from New York City to Paris in an economy seat with no headrest. It’s a long time to sit and watch a movie, or do anything, these days. But that didn’t stop 250-plus people from doing it on a recent early-spring Saturday in Manhattan. Sátántango, Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr’s 1994 miserabilist epic about a failed Hungarian farming collective, clocks in at 439 minutes. The film is something of a holy rite for hardcore cinephiles. Sitting still and watching a black-and-white movie for 7.5 hours is the sort of experience that’s in increasingly short supply. Despairing reports warn of the “attention-span crisis.” Parents are suing social media giants for stealing their kids’ ability to focus with addictive short-form video scrolls. “We’ve weakened the muscle of sustained attention,” says Film at Lincoln Center programmer Tyler Wilson. “Here’s an opportunity to be in a room, with the expectations that I’ll stay, and not look at my phone. There’s a shared discipline.” Sátántango is notable not just for its length. Across its 439 minutes, there are only 171 shots, with an average shot of about 2.5 minutes, about 60 times the length of the average shot in a Hollywood film. It’s a key text in a subgenre sometimes termed “slow cinema.” Where modern editing often aims to tighten the pace of time, slow cinema prolongs it. Getting sucked into a film for that long reshapes the senses. You become extra attentive. The eye begins to scan the images onscreen like they’re oil paintings in a gallery. Wilson sees Sátántango’s popularity as a cause for optimism. He says that audiences are taking a serious interest in preserving the sanctity of attention. “People do have attention, they just don’t have many places where they can use it,” Wilson says. “This movie’s going to take a day for you to watch. That in itself is almost a challenge.”