Wednesday, June 29, 2005
On Expectations and the Experience of Time
A few days ago I finally got around to following the advice of Alex Ross and Jerry Bowles and watched Andrei Tarkovsky's "The Sacrifice." I could have done without the pseudo-intellectual wanking at the beginning, but once that was over the film turned out to be quite brilliant and wonderful. But Netflix completely confused me about one thing: each Netflix DVD sleeve lists the duration of the program, and this one claimed something like "4:06." The apparent epic length was one of the things that delayed my viewing of the film to begin with, and when we finally watched it we decided to watch the first half one night and the second half the second night. I don't want to give away anything for people who might watch it, so I won't say where exactly we stopped, but it was about two hours in. The next night we resumed, to find that only 10 minutes or so of movie remained unwatched. My guess is that Netflix had reported on the total length of all of the material on the disc rather than on the length of the film.
To get to my point, though, because I was expecting a 4 hour epic, I watched scenes as if they were in the first half of the film that were in fact toward the end. The big climax, while still big and climactic, set me up to expect an even bigger climax some time in hour 3 or 4. I had the entire context of the film wrong, and ended up having to mentally and emotionally revise my understandings and impressions at the end, all because of where I believed certain scenes sat in the timeline of the whole work.
I had a similar experience the first time I heard John Adams's "Harmonium." In 1997 or 98, when I was at home on some break or other from my freshman year at Brandeis, the Handel Society at Dartmouth College put on a concert, the second half of which was "Harmonium." Composer and High School classmate Alex Reed and I snuck in during intermission to hear the piece. According to the program, Harmonium has three movements, but it turns out that movement two leads directly into movement three with no break. I heard movement three believing that it was the second half of movement two; toward the end of the piece, believing that we still had one movement to go, I felt that the piece was far too long, and as a result I was less able to appreciate the music I was hearing as I paced myself for yet another movement of possibly equally great length. And again, when the piece ended I had to go back and re-evaluate what I had heard in its new context.
I don't have any real analysis of this phenomenon, but I am fascinated by the ways in which our expectations of time impact our experience of the events that take place during that time, and how a misguided expectations of time can by itself undermine our understanding of, and even appreciation for, a work that moves through time.
Far more common than these mistaken expectations are vague or absent of expectations. We rely more heavily on structural cues to shape our experience -- and indeed our estimations of where we are in the timeline of the piece. Some pieces are predictable, some unpredictable due to poor structure, and occasionally the structure sets up chronological expectations in order to undermine them in some effective way. This line of thought also leads me to think in a new way about John Cage's "4:33" -- having removed all of the structural signposts that the audience relies upon, he establishes a firm timeline for the audience to work from by simply telling them how long the piece will last. It would be interesting to attend a performance of "4:33" where the silence was held for 7 or 8 minutes -- long enough that the audience knows for sure that the four minute thirty-three second marker has come and gone, and they're in open water with no expectations to cling to.
posted by Galen H. Brown
1:58 PM
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