Size isn’t everything – great artworks are the length they need to be
It’s nothing new to note that the rise of streaming services has the potential to unleash the screen artwork from its standard length and form. The television documentary maker Adam Curtis, for example, long ago embraced iPlayer rather than linear television for his films, because on the streaming platform they would find a home away from the “rigid formats and schedules of network television”. In 2015, his film Bitter Lake, about the banal narratives imposed on a complex world by reductive world leaders, occupied two hours and 20 minutes – more time than he would have been allotted by even the most indulgent channel controller.
In audio, podcasting has long liberated itself from the tight, clock-regulated schedules of radio. James Cameron, the director of Avatar and Titanic, has now mooted a world in which there is further freedom from time constraints: he imagines movies with a long-form version made for streaming, and a shorter version for the cinema – the cinema being a space, in many cultures, traditionally ruled by the ineluctable timetable of the human bladder (though Bollywood films, for instance, are long, and the bladder issue is easily dealt with by an acceptance that audience members will come and go from the auditorium). “I want to do a movie that’s six hours long and two-and-a-half hours long at the same time,” Cameron told Variety magazine. “Same movie. You can stream it for six hours, or you can go and have a more condensed, rollercoaster, immersive version of that experience in a movie theatre … Why not? Let’s just use these platforms in ways that haven’t been done before.” It is a fascinating notion and one that, if enacted, would cast light on the underrated work of the editor in film and TV, beyond the emergence of directors’ cuts of films from time to time (which are not invariably superior to, and often rather longer than, the usually tighter and more ruthless versions originally released by the studio).
