Film watching, mindfulness, and digital minimalism

By J. Alexander Yann

5/19/24

*Vanitas Still Life*, Pieter Claesz (1625)

In the last three months I have sat in a dark room, once a week, for roughly one and a half to two hours. My phone is set to silent, and aside from fiddling for popcorn or adjusting a sound mixer, my goal is to remain in my seat for the duration of the film, absorbing the movie that’s in front of me.

Absorb, instead of enjoy. I do often enjoy what I screen at the Station, but the word doesn’t fully enclose the experience. Sometimes film watching is a revisitation. Sometimes it is meditation, quietly letting in movies like a morning songbird through an open window. Sometimes the movie is a stinker, in which case enjoyment is definitely not the right word. Sometimes watching a movie is just watching a movie.

Regardless, the material conditions for screenings are generally the same. My phone is off, a movie is playing, and I do what I can to remain in my seat.

You would think, by the assessment of my peers, that I was running a marathon every week. Watching a movie in a theater this often elicits the nervous anxiety of an unwanted chore. It has the hallmarks of a trip to the DMV or a dentist appointment.

The idea of surrendering a minimum of a few hours in a dark space, one that typically obligates its participants to silence both themselves as well as their cell phones, feels vulnerable. I’m inclined to agree—it is a vulnerable practice and a demanding activity, one whose worth feels questionable in an increasingly isolated world that has seen community centers and third spaces abolished via capitalism. Why spend time in a dark space in which silence is sacrosanct, perpetuated by high-minded intellectuals who watch movies with their fingers interlaced like Mr. Burns? The value of the practice is elusive.

Furthermore, what if the movie is a stinker? Suddenly, watching a movie feels like gambling. You walk into a movie theater preparing to lose your money, time, and happiness because the odds are stacked against you. The possibility you will part from that theater with a winning prize (what that prize may be varies on the audience) is slim. The house always wins.

I am circumventing an obvious sentiment. You just might not like movies, or you don’t feel particularly inclined to enjoy one in a theater. Those are perfectly acceptable choices that conclude further interrogation.

Whether it is fear of value loss or isolation, the fear is there. What I hope to unpack is a case made to myself on why those handful of hours each week are worth my time, and why I continue to screen movies.

Modern technology has provided scaffolding for an invasive campaign to completely obliterate our attention spans. The unique design of digital devices is to be perpetually optimized towards their usage. It isn’t one singular website, app, or social media platform, or individual. Owning a smart device means opening yourself up to relentless jockeying of your time and attention through a myriad of tactics ranging from the banal to the downright sinister. At a microscopic level, it feels like a relatively innocent trade-off. One minute of scrolling for one hit of dopamine. One more text replied to, one more relationship secured. The reason behind the existence of such technology is of tepid predictability—it is profitable. Your time and attention is your data, and your data can be mined and sold.

The cost of its success is characteristically erosive. Over time, your ability to focus loses its tenacity. The terror provoked from a second of boredom is excruciating. Like a wanderer in the desert, reaching for your smartphone can be like upending a flask of cool water down your parched throat.

My intention is not to deliver some Neo-Luddite manifesto. I have a smartphone, I often use it. But the degradation of the attention-pilfering industry is something I’ve been working to steer away from. One can craft a few elegant arguments why it might be worthwhile (Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism offers several.)

However, there is one crime of this hyper aggressive technology that feels especially relevant. Endless scrolling is uninteresting. Internet content is rapidly speedrunning us through the same regurgitated material and has been for several decades. We’ve created an ill-sustained click farm that operates on content cannibalism. Your “For You Page” refreshes itself and reveals what is functionally the same 1-2 minute long dopamine hit you saw a moment ago. There is nothing new, nothing to be gained.

Sitting through a boring movie for two hours does not have the same consequence as scrolling for two hours. A boring movie has the possibility of firing off the engines of your imagination, or it can give you the space and insight to deconstruct why you might find such a movie boring. At the very least, a boring movie gives you the capacity to daydream, a perennial human sensation. You cannot tell me there wasn’t one Athenian bored out of his mind during a performance of Lysistrata nearly two and a half millennia ago. By contrast, two hours of scrolling leaves little room for the quietness of our thoughts. It is immediately and endlessly preoccupied from start to finish, and unlike boredom, it feels synthesized and manufactured, further away from the boundary lines of human condition. Perhaps this is preferable for advocates of the Quantified Self or technological Transhumanists, but I have a sneaking suspicion that their enthusiasm masks a characteristically human despair.

In a recent Left on the Projector episode on the film Stalker, guest host Breht O’Shea discusses how Andrei Tarkovsky’s approach to filmmaking forms an antithesis to what he refers to as hyperstimulation culture and scattered attention economy.

Tarkovsky’s films progress at a glacial pace. They are often bereft of attention-jarring scores. Multiple scenes may pass without a single line of dialogue. Engaging with a Tarkovsky movie necessitates acuity, one that is continually forcing us to interpret and articulate the sounds and images on the screen. The specific ambiguity of Stalker invites O’Shea and his fellow hosts to interpret the motivations of both the eponymous Stalker as well as that of the director—whose taciturn filmmaking refuses to provide an immediate, graspable answer.

I’ve screened around fifteen movies by now, and watched a handful more from my fellow curators. Each one is a space to exist outside of that scattered attention economy in a way that feels deliberate and thoughtful. Rather than forsaking my time, I’m giving it to something that harmonizes me with engagement.

Movie theaters create conditions in your favor to be mindful. A theater asks you to silence your phone and to be mindful of the experience of your fellow patrons. The room is dark. The only sounds one is expected to hear is from the speakers. Rarely are recreational activities allowed to be so singular in the focus of their environment. Mitigating the outside noise becomes a core benefit of the experience.

The result is measurable. I do see that dreaded screen time notification reporting smaller numbers every week, and there is a palpable shift in my ability to create and maintain relationships. It is one thing to watch a movie, now I want to share it. Share, not as in the bite-sized, insipid trivia facts that we’ve come to mistake for film discussion. Share, as in an achievement of a mutual benefaction.

It feels contrary to think of a theater as a communal space. It is a leisure activity that conjures perceptions of solitude. There are many images of the defiant loner or outcast slumped up in a movie theater seat, retreating from the scolding visage of society. It is often movies that perpetuate this stereotype.

Why, though, is it possible for a movie to bond me to someone, even if they were not there to watch it with me?

Years and years ago, a friend of mine insisted upon Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry. I opted for a familiar, dismissive response I took for many recommendations at that time, a kind nod and an affirming “I’ll add it to my list.” That friend has since moved away. We haven’t spoken in several years.

Flash forward a decade, and my partner has chosen Taste of Cherry as our evening movie. I’m receptive, but I do recall the reluctance. There was also that other hesitation. What if I just don’t like the movie? The anxiety of squandering an evening looms over me. I fear the wasted time.

By the movie’s penultimate scene, I realized how wrong I was to worry. As I watched a lightning storm illuminate and obscure the protagonist Mr. Badii’s face, I felt something. The emotional impact of the movie carried an auxiliary effect, something that stretched the boundary of time and place. I felt connected to the woman that recommended me Taste of Cherry a decade ago—I now know her more as I didn’t before. Further still, my partner and I made our own unique connection. We knew each other differently at that moment than we did before.

A year later, I screened Taste of Cherry at the Station. One of my closest and most cherished friends was in the audience. At the film’s conclusion, when the lights were drawn, I saw her tears. She now knew me differently than she did before.

*Taste of Cherry*, Abbas Kiarostami (1997)

The expectation isn’t that every screening must be an invitation to obtain a morsel of one’s being. It is just an opportunity, one of many, for creating a space for engagement that does not feel immediately shuttered in the same way scrolling on a phone does. It is continually residing within you, and may exist in perpetuity. I will always remember Taste of Cherry, I can barely remember the video I tried to show my friends last week. That sensation is fleeting and terminal.

Such value isn’t inherent to a specific film. You don’t have to watch a Tarkovsky or Kiarostami with the hopes of reclaiming your time, building up the endurance of your attention, or intimating deeper relationships with your loved ones.

Similarly, my intention isn’t to shame or proselytize people into flocking to the theaters. What watching movies has done for me can be achieved by reading, meditating, learning an instrument, seeing a play, even eating a meal. But the diligence of visiting a theater once a week, screening a movie, and discussing its merit, has deeply clarified my personal lens.

Finally, reclaiming one’s time and attention isn’t a goal immediately in service of myself or Idaho Film Society. An enduring attention span is an urgently relevant skill, regardless of how you procure it. The scattered attention economy is derivative of a more potent campaign to dismantle our gaze from the immediate crises of our lifetime. Furthermore, it is meant to destabilize your sense of effectiveness in combating those crises, leaving you hopeless, nihilistic, and inert.

To say watching films is a revolutionary act is a bit naive. It is more correct to say it is one practice of many that pivots us away from a superstructure that imposes upon our community values and sense of being. Having the endurance to look at something and pay attention are requisite tools for action. Goals of justice and liberation are only possible if we can endure the act of observation. We cannot afford to look away.

Our digital culture’s relentless fusillade of information is intentionally designed to disorient and isolate us from one another. Even when that information is relevant or revolutionary, the piecemeal quality of the platform forces us to become skeptical at best and cynical at worst. Building opposition to those efforts is less personal choice and more moral imperative.

This isn’t a rallying cry to discard your smart devices entirely—primitivism is its own uniquely isolating anti-community practice. Rather, this is a call to create space for something, anything, that allows you to mitigate the inequitable strength of the scattered attention economy by choosing to be mindful of the moment as it occurs. If that space happens to be for watching movies, you know where to find me once a week.

Reclaiming Time

Film watching, mindfulness, and digital minimalism

Pink Dream

Idaho Film Society