![]() To remind ourselves why “less is more”, we have compiled 30 of the best short feature films (of around 90 minutes or under) and novels (under roughly 200 pages) further below, we list 10 works we consider to have earned their right to length. Shakespeare’s compulsive talker Polonius declared “Brevity is the soul of wit”, but his garrulous inability to embody his own wisdom indirectly killed him. ![]() He would have loved Dorothy Parker’s joke of a poem, entitled Two-Volume Novel: It is best to leave some of the work to us.Įvelyn Waugh once said there was nothing, no matter how momentous, that you couldn’t fit onto the back of a postcard. The novelist Toni Morrison spoke out about the importance of what is not said, the reading between the lines. Editing must not become an endangered art. It is easier to let a story run on than to polish it until it shines. Most of us will have had the experience of leaving a cinema feeling that the film could have painlessly had half an hour lopped off and been the better for it. Length can be an indulgence, a rummaging for clarity and, at its worst, an affront to a reader. EM Forster championed brevity, once remarking, “One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.” Ernest Hemingway advised: “To be successful in writing, use short sentences.” George Orwell was more ruthless still: “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.” For here is the curious truth: length is easier than brevity. We seem to be coming adrift from the trim advice that dominated a generation of early and mid-20th-century writers. That might be positive, but the dangers of valuing length in and of itself could not be clearer. Are we, in the age of the soundbite, tweet and TikTok, becoming rebelliously nostalgic for an era when there seemed to be more time?Įvelyn Waugh once said there was nothing, no matter how momentous, that you couldn’t fit on to the back of a postcard Fantasy fiction is especially incontinent: the last Game of Thrones book, A Dance With Dragons, was 413,202 words, trumping the dimensions of the Victorian novel and in defiance of our distractible modern attention spans. The average length of those on the Booker prize shortlist, in 2019, was 530 pages. ![]() According to publisher Flipsnack, novels have been getting longer for a couple of decades. Length seems to be becoming dangerously confused with artistic prestige – as though short equals superficial or critically lightweight. Is the idea that sitting in a cinema interminably makes it more of an event, earns you epic stripes as a cinema-goer – makes you a co-hero along with Batman (whose most recent outing was three hours long)? Or are you more likely to be furtively checking the time in the dark? And Avatar: The Way of Water, the third highest-grossing film of all time, spills on for three hours 12 minutes. This year’s Oscar contenders have also been taking their – and our – time: All Quiet on the Western Front, Elvis and Tár are two-and-a-half hours long each. Martin Scorsese’s latest film, Killers of the Flower Moon, has been in the news not for its content but because it is three hours 20 minutes long (and he has form on this – The Irishman was three hours 29 minutes). A growing trend for longer films and heftier novels has recently been attracting indignant comment.
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