The Guardian view on the six-hour show: the curious business of lengthy art
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).
The potential freedom for artists to be liberated from the strictures of scheduling and “acceptable” lengths is not necessarily a good thing, of course. Nobody wants to watch a maundering, meandering, overlong artwork that could have said all that it needed to say within 30 minutes or could easily have had an hour sliced out of it. The most recent James Bond film, at two hours 28 minutes, was felt by many people to be “too long” for its material.
On the other hand, length is a curious business in time-based art. The speed at which minutes appear to pass has little to do with the actual progress of hands round a clock face. In the right hands, a work as mighty in scale and length as The Valkyrie – as evinced by its recent reappearance on the stage of the Coliseum in London with English National Opera – can slip by, although the official run time was five hours. Wagner’s opera is full of twists and drama, and – perhaps unlike some of his other works – never drags. But scale isn’t everything. Caryl Churchill’s latest play What If If Only, staged at London’s Royal Court, occupied 20 minutes – and yet, in its brief and concentrated span, as it explored loss and bereavement, plumbed depths. The reality is that great artworks find the length they need to be. Getting that right isn’t easy: but it is part of the artist’s job.