Watching films as a person with a chronic illness

 I rarely post anything and I don't know if people view film blogs anymore. At this point I don't care, I'm writing this as someone who occasionally struggles with films because of a condition. On paper I was diagnosed with chronic pain syndrome but fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue have also been brought up. It's a hideously vague term that I sometimes don't believe in myself but when it hits, I totally understand why it is what it is. I also seem to fall asleep at extremely odd hours when I'm overcome with crippling fatigue or my eyes sting like hell etc. etc. I sometimes wondered in my youth if I had narcolepsy but I sometimes feel what I have is far too structured in its own disorder for that sort of thing. I read that Nastassja Kinski had a form of narcolepsy too - but I'm going off on a tangent here. This post might be just full of tangents - it's how I am.

I write this on a disused film blog because of one thing - how my illness has affected how I watch films. In particular, I've come to dread standard 2 hour plus films - dramas, comedies, arthouse etc.- for the simple reason that my body can totally shut down at any moment. Now a good film is said to make you forget about all these things and that's true but there's that moment where half an hour into a film I'm really enjoying and then something in my brain snaps and I become weary, tired and in dire need of sleep and the film in many ways is ruined because it's hard to work back into the suspension of disbelief. Therefore I've learned to feed off films that are shorter in length and can tell a story quicker. 

On the other hand, I've also learned to enjoy some extraordinary documentaries that are both shorter and some long-scale in length because some of them sequence them into separate parts that it feels like a book. Take into consideration Peter Watkins' The Journey or Winfried Junge's Die Kinder von Golzow saga. These films comprise of many different parts to the point that you don't have to think of watching them all in one go, separate sittings are accepted and with it you can bring new feelings towards each part because you start afresh not with the lingering malaise of plot, subplot, characters and so on. It might seem extremely silly to someone who is of a healthy disposition but these ultra long documentaries are great because they help my brain internally compartmentalise the fact that the film director accepts you're going to need more than one sitting to fully grasp what is going on. Ulrike Ottinger's Chamisso's Shadow is also a good testament to this as well.

Films for the most part live and die by the fact that they are to be watched in one sitting. They expect a certain level of suspension of disbelief and in saying that, as someone who tires easily, it's not always possible. Part of me marvels at the old one reelers that came out well over a century ago. How they can tell a concise story in under 15 minutes is to be marvelled at. Many of the films today are pretty much the same except stretched out for an hour and a half to two hours - possibly more - because there is something that I've come to dread in cinema is "backstory," because maybe there was something that happened in a character's history that made them become the person they are and made them do this thing in the film and that it *could* make you feel differently about them. What that effectively means to me is a lazy way of trying to incorporate manipulation of the viewer for that is what the medium is all about but effectively, I feel it is a cheap way of excusing their behaviour. The same way American politicians try to excuse a white man going on a murder spree due to a mental disorder - it cheapens what you've seen and makes a mockery of a person's sensibilities.

I realise that this is my own subjective experience and that I cannot do anything else about it but I wanted to air these feelings in as brief a way as possible. After I've written this, I will hope to see if there are anything else written on the experience of being an avid film viewer who has chronic ailments and how they get around the experience. If I can think of anything more to say about film outside of one particular film, I will do so here but otherwise it'll be on Letterboxd.