Quicker, faster, darker: Changes in Hollywood film over 75 years

Abstract

We measured 160 English-language films released from 1935 to 2010 and found four changes. First, shot lengths have gotten shorter, a trend also reported by others. Second, contemporary films have more motion and movement than earlier films. Third, in contemporary films shorter shots also have proportionately more motion than longer shots, whereas there is no such relation in older films. And finally films have gotten darker. That is, the mean luminance value of frames across the length of a film has decreased over time. We discuss psychological effects associated with these four changes and suggest that all four linear trends have a single cause: Filmmakers have incrementally tried to exercise more control over the attention of filmgoers. We suggest these changes are signatures of the evolution of popular film; they do not reflect changes in film style.

Keywords: film; luminance; motion; shot lengths.

Figure 1.

Four linear trends across 75 years of Hollywood film. Panel a shows the decreasing average shot lengths (ASLs) of films with the ordinate logarithmically scaled. Panel b shows the increase in the visual activity index (VAI) across the same period. VAIs are derived from correlating next-adjacent frame pairs across the length of each film, and then taking 1.0 − median r of the resulting distribution (except for year-2010 films, these data are from Cutting et al 2011b). Panel c shows the increasingly negative correlation between shot length and within-shot VAI for all shots in a given film. Finally, panel d shows the luminance of films over the last 75 years, with contemporary films becoming increasingly darker than their predecessors.