Changes in Conversations Across a Century of Popular Cinema

Abstract

Abstract Over the course of a century, filmmakers of popular cinema have composed conversations between two characters in several ways. Here, I investigate three. The oldest but initially rare conversational format occurred in silent movies, placing single characters in alternating shots either at midframe or on the same side of the screen. Next, beginning about 1930, movies began to show dyads with the camera looking over the shoulder of one character, and then reversing to show the other over the shoulder of the first. And finally, by the 1950s they increasingly began to place characters in alternating shots on opposite sides of the screen. I assessed the relative frequencies of these three types in over 60,000 shots in 210 movies released from 1915 to 2015. Each of these yoked-shot pairings increased, and by about 1990 they encompassed more than a third of all shots in popular cinema. But their increases were not uniform and their relative prominence has continually changed almost to the present day. A relevant factor is that mean shot durations decreased from the 1960s into the 2000s. Strikingly, once the average shot duration declined to about 5 s by the 1990s, the durations of same-side character pairings became systematically shorter in duration than opposing-side pairings, likely because of constraints of eye movements.