US research suggests that 92 minutes is the optimum length for a film. But I have sat through long films that felt short and short films that felt buttock-annihilatingly long
I can still remember sitting down to Theo Angelopoulos’s legendary epic film The Travelling Players and noting that it was 222 minutes long and thinking … sure, cool, two hours and twenty-two minutes, tiny bit on the long side, OK, nothing I can’t handle. The truth hit me just as the house lights were starting to dim and that spasm of unease came back into my mind reading about the new US research survey that suggests that 92 minutes is the “perfect” length for a film.
The “perfect” length? What does that even mean? Larry David fans will remember his magnificent resentment in Curb Your Enthusiasm when someone tries to think of something nice to say about his hugely unsuccessful feature film Sour Grapes and finally says: “It was such a perfect length.” Larry replies acidly: “What about the width? There’s some great width in that movie!” Ninety-two minutes? Does that extra two minutes mean you’re not such a wimp that you can’t stand a film that goes above an hour and a half?
