> A festival in Montreal has just done something that, judging from the reaction, you would think involved setting fire to the negative. [They] screened Anne Émond’s [Peak Everything) at 1.5 times its normal speed. [The initiative] was conceived to provoke a conversation about how a younger audience actually consumes moving images in 2026.
> François Delisle pulled his own film Le temps from the festival in protest. (...) RTL France reported the experiment as a worrying new habit. (...) [Yet] the organisers did not [run it fast] for laughs. They went to Émond, to her producer and to her distributor, secured agreement from all three, scheduled a single 1.5x screening on 25 April, (...) and bolted on a panel discussion afterwards.
> Watching cinema at the wrong speed is not new. (...) Any projectionist of a certain vintage will tell you (...) the last reel of the last film often ran a little faster than 24 frames per second. The motivation was rarely artistic. The bus home, the pub, a partner. (...) PAL television standard turned this into industrial practice. Films shot at 24 frames per second have, for the better part of seventy years, been broadcast across European television at 25 frames per second.
> Variable playback speed on YouTube [has been] available since 2010. Netflix rolled out 0.5x to 1.5x playback on Android in July 2020, having been called everything from a vandal to a grave-robber. (...) Spotify, Audible and every podcast app on earth allow the same. (...) Fifty percent of 18-to-34-year-olds had watched a video on accelerated playback in the previous month.
> Average runtime for wide theatrical releases rose from around 106 minutes in the 1990s and early 2000s to roughly 114 minutes. (...) Mission: Impossible expanded from 110 minutes to 170. (...) Their problem is not really that the audience is in a hurry. Their problem is that the audience is voting with the playback slider on a thing that, twenty years ago, the editor would have trimmed before anyone outside the room saw it.
> If the work earns its 180 minutes, audiences will sit through it without reaching for the slider; Oppenheimer grossed nearly a billion dollars at full speed. (...) That is not the death of cinema. It is a question, addressed to the people who make the films, about whether every minute they have asked us to sit through is genuinely worth the asking.
https://patrickvonsychowski.substack.com/p/the-projectionist-always-sped-up
