Neil Archer, Senior Lecturer in Film
As octogenarian filmmakers go, is there any fiercer generator of clickbait than Martin Scorsese? In 2019, a throwaway comment in Empire kicked off a shitstorm around whether or not Marvel movies ‘are cinema’. Now, in a slightly less shitstormy way – with the release of his new film, the three and a half-hour-long Killers of the Flower Moon – he’s got us debating the physical limits of cinema itself.
How long is a piece of string? More than a rhetorical shrug, the question also has an answer: as long as it needs to be. The possibility that this year’s Cannes Film Festival might refuse to programme Killers of the Flower Moon due to its length (they since backtracked) was enough to raise the hackles of some film critics, defending the right of artists to take their time. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody writes, for example, of the long film being ‘without conventions—it’s like turning a football field, with its sidelines and yard lines, into an open field, unmarked and unbounded and in demand of exploration… offering filmmakers the opportunity to discover the unknown at the risk of getting lost’.
Brody’s point is that with extremes of length, everything goes into uncharted territory. The results could be great, or they might be less so. Time in the movies, in any case, is mutable. Three hours is never three hours: it can go like that, or it can go on all day. Some three-hour films I never really wanted to end. When it works, no one’s looking at the clock. How long should movies be? How long is a piece of string?
Movie time, then, is relative; though as Brody hints, the issue of movie length is never just a question of ‘whatever works’. The long film provokes anxiety less amongst audiences and more amongst film producers, because of its potentially excessive costs and disruption of movie-theatre economics. Until it didn’t, James Cameron’s Titanic (1997 – 194 minutes) had some at 20th Century Fox thinking it was going to sink the studio, much like the oft-maligned Heaven’s Gate (1980 – 219 minutes) had effectively shut the door on United Artists. Three-hour films, the logic also went, didn’t make exhibition sense, because theatres could put on fewer screenings in a day. Long films were essentially an indulgence for which the Hollywood studios could rarely afford to pay.
Except when they chose to, that is. In the Hollywood system, apart from the occasional franchise event movie (Avengers: Endgame [2019 – 182 minutes]) it’s a rare film that makes it to three hours and counting without some significant filmmaker clout behind it. Cameron was no upstart when he took on Titanic, and afterwards – by the time he came to Avatar (2009 – 162 minutes) – was the Oscar-winning director of (then) the world’s biggest ever film. (The director of the ill-fated Heaven’s Gate, Michael Cimino, was himself an Oscar-winner for The Deer Hunter [1978]). Scorsese’s own fairly recent turn toward the three-hour picture, in fact, comes off not merely a celebrated fifty-year career but more specifically his own (belated) Oscar, in 2007, for The Departed.
Filmmakers generally earn the ‘right’ to make long films, then. This also means that the long film is bound up with the notion of the cinematic auteur, and of filmmaking that refuses to follow the supposedly more boxed-in, standardised, and (let us say it) ‘generic’ films that make up most of mainstream cinema. It’s no surprise to find that, of all films, those that win Academy Awards tend to be longer on average than others. It’s not a new thing, either: the very longest film to win an Oscar was made in 1939 (Gone with the Wind – 224 minutes).
Length also means gravity (except when the film is actually called Gravity [2013 – 91 minutes]). Gone with the Wind’s pre-packaged status as a prestige film, an adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s already bulky novel (426,000 words), dictated that it be no ‘ordinary’ movie. Into the 1950s, when cinema first found itself in competition with the domestic attractions of TV, the ‘epic film’ came into fashion, along with its wider aspect ratios and equally ‘epic’ lengths (1959’s Oscar-winning Ben Hur – 217 minutes; 1965’s The Greatest Story Ever Told – 260 minutes). While such films are now more commonly enjoyed on catch-up over a leisurely holiday weekend, they were once only viewable in theatres, uninterrupted except for one bladder-relieving intermission. Experienced as types of endurance test, the benumbed audience can’t help but feel the very weight of these movies’ historical import. Exhaustion becomes part of the experience; or in film theorist Vivian Sobchack’s words, such films ‘reprint [their] version of History not only for posterity but also on our posteriors’.
The importance of run-times is not lost on the epic’s more recent successors, such as Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings series (2001-2003), its climactic final instalment (The Return of the King) clocking in at 201 minutes, ensuring (in Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw’s words) that ‘no flabber has been left ungasted… nor no gob unsmacked’. Jackson was also amongst the first of the auteur-blockbuster directors to understand the attraction of the DVD ‘extended edition’ (250 minutes), offering even more bang for your well-spent buck.
Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003): Long title, even longer film
At this point, it’s worth holding up a moment to note how the defence of length easily slips into a defence of maximalism: a kind of muscular, and therefore, one might say, masculine idea of film-making and even viewing as some sort of heroic activity, a test of strength. I’m reminded – hilarious full disclosure – of how my thirteen year-old self took pride in (trying to) read the thickest fantasy and horror paperbacks: Lord of the Rings, obviously; Stephen King’s It (still unfinished); or revered rock tracks for their famous length (Iron Maiden’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ – 13:39 minutes; Rush’s ‘2112’ – 20:34 minutes) (Bradshaw, notably, compares watching Return of the King to the consumption of 1970s prog-rock albums).
Couched also behind Brody’s list of marathon-length movies is, inadvertently, but inevitably in a gender-imbalanced industry, the fact that these are a lot of films made by men, more often than not about them, and often – in the case of Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street (2013 – 180 minutes) or The Irishman (2019 – 209 minutes) – not very nice ones. Except, of course, when this is far from the case, the famous exception here being Sight & Sound’s recent poll-topper Jeanne Dielman: 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975 – 201 minutes). Far from the masculine posturing of Scorsese’s white- and blue-collar criminals, Chantal Akerman’s feminist masterpiece spends much of its time showing its protagonist doing mundane household chores, in extreme detail and in real time. Extreme length here intentionally flirts with extreme boredom, but with a pointed and political intent.
These issues aside, where I also baulk at the defence of the long movie is what it sometimes implies about those that aren’t long. I’m reminded here of those ‘Taste the Difference’ products supermarkets offer, with their implicit message that the rest of the stuff on the shelves is dross. The maximalist logic of lengthy running-times is that added time means added value. The vast majority of films I’ve seen in my lifetime are two hours and less. Have I been cheated all this time? Cheated, rather, of all the extra viewing time I could have had, if the filmmakers hadn’t been so constrained, so craven?
It’s a ridiculous thought. If the 201 minute version of The Return of the King released in theatres wasn’t the best film its makers could have made, then why not? But there’s a similar argument to be made too for those ‘conventional’ two-hour films. If we’re going to talk about Scorsese, would I really need a minute more of Taxi Driver (1976 – 114 minutes) or Raging Bull (1980 – 129 minutes) for these to be any more remarkable? Would those same Sight & Sound pollsters who previously made Vertigo (1958 – 128 minutes) their number one choice be any more enraptured by the film if someone dug up Hitchcock’s four-hour ‘extended cut’?
Taxi Driver (1976): Not that long, it turns out.
Shakespeare (in Romeo and Juliet) wrote about the ‘two hours traffic of our stage’, and for a reason: drama, life, comedy and tragedy in its richness and complexity can be compressed into a swift package. On stage, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, the ur-text for a thousand movie scripts, plays in little more than an hour, but how much happens in that hour! The ‘conventions’ that shape the two-hour film aren’t constrictions, but an ancient and lasting dramatic framework that, like the sonnet or the three-minute song, can produce infinite invention and variation. Citizen Kane (1941 – 119 minutes); Singin’ in the Rain (1952 – 103 minutes); Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962 – 90 minutes) Chinatown (1974 – 131 minutes); Do the Right Thing (1989 – 120 minutes); Reservoir Dogs (1992 – 99 minutes); Clueless (1995 – 97 minutes); Memento (2000 – 120 minutes): I could go on, but, well, there isn’t time.
Thank God then for Netflix and Apple TV – who also bankrolled, respectively, The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon. It’s one of the great peculiarities of our time that amongst many other things, our modern streaming services should also be the saviours of sprawling auteur films that, as was the case with The Irishman, no Hollywood studio wanted to make. If it means watching Scorsese’s new epic on the smaller rather than big screen, so be it. At least, in that way, I’ll have the option of watching it in two two-hour chunks.
Keele Film Studies 