Studies of Rhythm in Cinema, from the 1960 to Today - Text 1
Ascertaining an Accelerated Rhythm
Beginning in the 1970s, film scholars David Bordwell and Barry Salt became interested in the question of rhythm. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, they analyzed the average shot length of 15,000 films produced between 1910 and 2010, demonstrating the constant acceleration of editing rhythm over time. Indeed, over a period of approximately one hundred years, the average shot length reportedly decreased from 8–11 seconds to 3–6 seconds.[1] Action films such as those belonging to the The Avengers and Transformers franchises thus featured average shot lengths ranging from two to three seconds. The overall record-holder, however, reportedly remained Dark City, a science-fiction film released in 1998, with an average shot length of only 1.8 seconds.