Cameras roll, the platform shakes and Sharon Stone -- her famous face all but obscured inside a black diving helmet -- widens her eyes in a simulacrum of fear. Her director, Barry Levinson, is speaking to her in real time through a hidden earpiece: ''Fireball is coming up, coming up . . . coming straight toward you . . . wham! In your face!'' She grimaces appropriately as a beam of yellow light flares from somewhere beneath her right foot. One shot completed.
She is sitting with Dustin Hoffman to her left and Samuel L. Jackson to her right, all crushed inside a flimsy plastic bubble elevated high off the floor of a Warner Brothers production set in an old Navy base in Northern California. When the movie, ''Sphere,'' is finished, and the green-screen background is digitally replaced with computer-processed rushing water, the bubble will pass convincingly for a miniature submarine. A submarine in a hurry, you can tell: on a panel behind the actors, radiant red numerals flash the passing time in tenths of a second. (Tenths are also the new standard for that when-all-else-fails mechanism of suspense, the bomb with its own handy clock display. This summer ''Men in Black'' flashed an end-of-the-world countdown in hundredths of a second, a blur of numerals, with tongue in cheek, presumably.)
The crew sets up again for the shot. ''We'll go tumble, tumble, tumble, tumble; then suddenly here goes the fireball,'' says Levinson. An assistant, counting, notes, ''That's four tumbles.'' One of the two active cameras is mounted on gimbals, so it can spin through 360 degrees, and on rails, so it can rush toward the minisub, creating the illusion of motion at implausibly high speed. Only the most cynical of viewers will consider that a submarine so bulbous and unstreamlined could never cut through the water this fast. ''Stand by for the shaking -- hold on, everybody,'' the director shouts, and the actors brace their gloved hands and black boots inside the bubble. They speak their lines all together: ''We're going into it!'' ''Pull up, pull up, pull up!'' Levinson watches through both cameras at once via remote television monitors -- on the modern film set, there is no waiting around for ''dailies.'' It's still not quite right. ''Can we spin faster?'' he says. ''Spin faster!''
No matter how fast a movie goes these days -- or a situation comedy, a newscast, a music video or a television commercial -- it is not fast enough. Vehicles race, plunge and fly faster; cameras pan and shake faster, and scenes cut faster from one shot to the next. Some people don't like this. ''Shot-shot-shot-shot, because television has accustomed us to a faster pace,'' says Annette Insdorf, a Columbia University film historian. ''Music videos seem to have seeped into the rhythms of creativity. It's rare these days -- it's rare in 1997 -- that films afford the luxury of time.''
But television, too, is behaving like a horse with a methamphetaminic driver. A new forward-looking unit within NBC, called NBC 2000, has been taking an electronic scalpel to the ''blacks'' -- the barely perceptible instants when a show fades to black and then rematerializes as a commercial. Over the course of a night, this can save the network as much as 15 precious seconds, or even 20, but that is not the whole point. The point is that the viewer is in a hurry, or so NBC 2000 has determined. That's you cracking the whip. Give you a full second of blank screen and your thumb starts to squeeze the change-channel button. . . .
New technologies, in living rooms and in editing studios, are helping to drive the pace of art and entertainment -- just as they are driving the pace of virtually everything else in our work lives and our leisure time. Levinson is not a director of action movies -- on the contrary, his best work (''Diner,'' ''Rain Man,'' ''Avalon'') has flowed at the pace of human character growth, on distinctly nondigital backgrounds with rich emotional texture. In these films, the clocks didn't need second hands. But here he is, in a darkened hangar, shooting the purest action sequence of his career, eyes on the monitors as three fine actors hurl themselves from side to side in the style of the troupers on the bridge of the starship Enterprise. We will not linger. We will cut to: int. the director's trailer -- day where the same Barry Levinson is lamenting the summer of ''Speed 2'' -- and for that matter the whole notion of bang-zip-pow ''summer movies.'' Do our brains stop working in summer? ''It's not an accident that all the movies of the summer are rides,'' he says. ''Adrenaline! Our rhythms are radically different. We're constantly accelerating the visual to keep the viewer in his seat.'' The restless viewer is very much on the film makers' minds -- though at least in the movie theater they can expect viewers to stay in place for the allotted hundred minutes.
''I don't know that we demand more content -- we demand more movement,'' says Levinson. ''We're packing more in, but the irony is that it isn't more substance. We all become part of that. We all become less patient.'' And . . . why? Well, there is television.
''You cannot put a child in front of a television set where he is bombarded by images and not ultimately have an adult who is born and bred to see things differently,'' he says. ''How can that not alter us?''
To older critics, who grew up with what now seems a methodical and plodding style of film storytelling, it seems as if we are engaged in a psychology experiment conceived by a slightly sadistic professor who assaults the subjects with visual images at a rate up to and beyond the limits of perception. A generation ago, the word ''subliminal'' came into vogue, as in ''subliminal advertising,'' with a fear that images could flash by so fast that we might see them, and come under their sway, without quite seeing them. Now we're used to subliminal imagery. We don't get scared when a commercial for Nike or Pepsi-Cola goes off on our screen like a string of firecrackers, but still. . . . How much do we comprehend? How do we feel afterward? What will we want next? Reviewers talk routinely now about visual candy and visual popcorn, of the sinews of plot and character melting away amid a boil of visceral gratification. Fifteen years have passed since Pauline Kael, in The New Yorker, assailed the turn to hyperactivity represented, for her, by ''Star Wars'' and ''Raiders of the Lost Ark'' -- two films that raised the bar for impossibly fast action sequences. And what a difference 15 years makes: compared with their progeny, these films now stand as classics; they had structure, characters and wit. Now we have what Anthony Lane, one of Kael's successors, calls ''our own ever-growing predicament: there is nothing so boring in life, let alone in cinema, as the boredom of being excited all the time.''
Instantaneity rules, on the screen and on the networks as in our daily lives: instant replay, instant coffee, instant intimacy, instant gratification. The changing pace of media from films to television commercials, from broadcast news to music videos, both reflects and conditions a changing pace in our psyches. No wonder we complain -- yet we have chosen this, as individuals and as a culture, and perhaps we thrive on it more than we admit. We are filling a hunger. The faster we jump from scene to scene or from channel to channel, the more we get -- if not more quality, then at least more variety.
Robert Levine, a social psychologist, cites studies that find ''grazers'' changing channels 22 times a minute. ''They approach the airwaves as a vast smorgasbord, all of which must be sampled, no matter how meager the helpings,'' Levine notes in his new book, ''A Geography of Time.'' He contrasts these frenetically greedy Westerners -- Americans, mostly -- with Indonesians ''whose main entertainment consists of watching the same few plays and dances, month after month, year after year,'' and Nepalese Sherpas who eat the same meals of potatoes and tea through their entire lives. The Indonesians and Sherpas are perfectly satisfied, Levine says. But are they? Will they spurn that remote control when it is offered? Or is the accumulation of speed, along with the accumulation of variety, along with the accumulation of wealth, a one-way street in human cultural evolution?
Levinson's own television series, ''Homicide: Life on the Streets,'' grabbed the attention of critics with its frenetic, jittery camera style -- so extreme that he sometimes had trouble getting his editors to cut scenes the way he wanted. ''We jump the screen constantly,'' he says. ''Sometimes we double-cut or triple-cut a moment; you see it quicker and you see more variations of it.'' In ''Homicide,'' this style is meant to convey a kind of gritty true-life realism, but the style can be completely divorced from any particular tone or mood. Watch a talk show like ''Loveline'' on MTV and you see the same uneasy visual style, cameras constantly on the go. The content is nothing but people talking, but no shot seems to last more than a second. If it did -- if the camera actually settled on one person's face for the time it takes to speak a full sentence -- would we change the channel?
This is a matter of visual language evolving into something new. Not everything is faster. Hardly any modern film features the kind of exhilarating machine-gun dialogue that filled the screwball comedies of the 30's, by Howard Hawks and others. The camera's eye remained more or less fixed -- it had to, with all the bulky apparatus of talking pictures -- while Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell volleyed repartee across the screen. The new technology of radio forced briskness and brevity on speakers like politicians, who were accustomed to orating on the stump for three hours at a stretch, or preachers, sometimes drilling words into their listeners at speeds that historians retrospectively put at a remarkable 200 words a minute.
But even the rat-a-tat-tat of Walter Winchell on the radio and the breakneck wordplay of Groucho Marx (''You can leave in a taxi -- if you can't leave in a taxi you can leave in a huff -- if that's too soon you can leave in a minute and a huff'') lag when compared with any modern comic monologue of Robin Williams -- jokes, allusions, personas flying past the ear at nearly subliminal pace. Williams set some sort of manic speed record as the voice of the genie in the 1992 ''Aladdin.'' The Disney animated feature of this summer, ''Hercules,'' trying to raise the ante again, has a half-dozen characters imitating Williams in raw speed, but lacking the substance, the quick differentiation of voices, that keeps him on the high wire.
Psychologists note that, while a normal fast-talker speaks at up to 150 words a minute, listeners can process speech at three to four times that speed. Can and, these days, want to. This gap accounts for the fast-playback button on telephone answering machines and for auctioneers and racetrack announcers and for the fast-talking shtick of John Moschitta Jr., who reached his summit of popularity, appropriately enough, in his famous Federal Express commercials. The gap also creates an opening where ennui creeps in. A normal human being speaking at normal speed -- the President of the United States, say, taking a full hour to deliver the State of the Union message -- is less likely than ever to deliver the constant punch needed to hold our attention. Our minds race on like runaway conveyor belts while hapless Lucy Ricardos struggle to grab the chocolates. Mere conversation, in front of an inert camera, doesn't seem to do it.
Boredom and efficiency are fueling the engine. That is, fear of boredom (yours) and the hunger for efficiency (theirs). Just as the technology of remote control has made it possible for you to run from boredom without leaving the couch, the technologies of market research have made it possible for television programmers to detect the first glimmerings of ennui, apathy and listlessness, almost before you yourself become aware of them. It was not always so. Until 1973, television shows estimated their share of the audience program by program. In that year, Nielsen Media Research brought a new technology on line nationwide: the ''Storage Instantaneous Audimeter,'' measuring minute by minute.
Twenty-five years ago that seemed finicky. Today it's just quaint. A minute is an ocean. Researchers now take sample audiences and place buttons or dials in their hands so that they can offer reactions in real time -- that is, in the most herky-jerky, visceral fashion, without even a second's worth of processing or reflection. Was that remark funny or dull? Quick! Is this slow passage perhaps a setup for something different? We'll never know. Adagio is not a permissible tempo for a test audience spinning dials.
''Every station looks at every second of air time and uses it to the best of its ability,'' says John Miller, executive vice president of advertising and promotion and event programming at NBC. ''We're all bound by the laws of physics. There are only 24 hours in a day and 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute. Everybody looks at their time with a microscope to get the best utilization they can. It is the only real estate we have.''
One shocking piece of news turned up by NBC's research was that, as a typical show reached its end and the credits began to roll, one viewer in four would find better things to do. ''You had 25 percent of our audience flipping around to see what else is out there,'' Miller says. That was clearly intolerable. A 25 percent drop in market share in return for gratifying the egos of the cast and crew?
The NBC 2000 unit solved this problem by creating what is known as the squeeze-and-tease: the credits are compressed into one-third of the screen (carefully tested for borderline readability) while the remaining two-thirds is used for ''promo-tainment.'' This, in Miller's words, is ''interstitial programming'' with ''attitude.'' You might see stars bantering about and around the peacock. If you actually take in the screenwriter's name on the right and chuckle at the wisecrack on the left, you are multitasking in yet one more way. Anyway, every network has quickly adopted the same technique, because it is just enough, it seems, to hold your attention for the critical 10 or 30 seconds that would otherwise loom before you like an eternity.
The salient piece of technology in this equation is the one you hold in your hand. When the first remote controls appeared, they seemed like innocent devices that would save viewers several trips each evening from the bed or sofa to the television set -- how wonderful to be able to turn up the volume or change the channel without walking across the room. No one imagined the full power inherent in the remote control; no one thought in terms of hundreds or thousands of channel changes per evening. Now every television programmer works in the shadow of the awareness that the audience is armed.
From one point of view, the remote control is a classic case of technology that worsens the very problem it is meant to solve. ''The ease of changing channels by remote control has promoted a more rapid and disorienting set of images to hold the viewer,'' says Edward Tenner, the author of ''Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences.'' ''This, in turn, is leading to less satisfaction with programs as a whole, which of course promotes more rapid channel surfing.'' If only the programmers could tie your hands . . . for your own good! Still, isn't possession of the remote a form of power? It is a weapon against boredom or against bad programming, even if the audience does not always use it wisely.
The networks' time obsession has changed the basic structure of standard shows like the 30-minute (23-minute, really) situation comedy. Network programmers feel they can no longer afford the batch of commercials that used to separate the end of one show from the beginning of the next. So those commercials have moved inside the shows, creating little islands of program at the beginning and the end, cut off by several minutes from the main body. Clever writers use these for stand-alone opening jokes and codas. ''It's jokes and story right from the git go -- jump in and go,'' says Skip Collector, the editor for ''Seinfeld.'' ''That kind of relates to our life style and our pace. Everybody's rushing and going, and that's what we're going to do.''
''Seinfeld'' is one show that uses the split-screen closing-credit time for a final joke rather than give it up for promo-tainment. It has also dispensed with the traditional half-minute or so of opening titles: Mary Tyler Moore throwing her hat in the air week after week, or Cosby's family dancing around. More and more sitcoms just start with running story and flash a three- to five-second art card with the name of the show. ''We're trying to pack so much information into so little time,'' Collector says, ''that it doesn't make sense to give up 30 seconds just to flash somebody's face in the title.''
To fill the countless little gaps that used to be dead air or a still picture over an orchestral signature, there are promos, opens, bumpers and channel ID's. NBC alone commissions 8,000 different promos a year. They range from 10 seconds to the two-minute ''long form,'' and they represent an astounding deployment of technical sophistication -- products of a marriage between computers and the visual arts. In the early 1980's, designers with new computer-graphics systems, a Paintbox and a Harry, could suddenly produce complex animated effects in an hour that had previously taken a full day. ''Now you could start doing all sorts of wacky things,'' says Laura Tolkow, a New York-based broadcast designer. ''Then you could hook up a K-scope, a Kaleidoscope, and see things flying at you, distort things, make things turn around. You started seeing these effects everywhere.
''Supposedly, we as designers have a reason for doing what we're doing,'' she says. ''It's not just pizzazz. But the fact is, the tools do affect what you're doing, and all this stuff keeps improving and getting better. If you know you can do something, you want to give it a try, right?''
With the ability to compose effects frame by frame, to create multiple layers, images dissolving into new images, designers know that the viewer cannot always keep up. ''There's a lot of intense stuff going on there -- a lot of multilayering, a lot of compositing,'' says Tom Ohanian, the chief editor at Avid Technology, a leading manufacturer of digital editing systems for the film and television industries. ''The technology encourages experiment.''
And some of the power of these bits of video lies purely and simply in their speed -- the length of time between cuts steadily decreasing, to the point that we routinely absorb sequences of shots lasting eight frames, a third of a second, or less. For someone creating a 10-second spot that will be seen over and over again, an effect that cannot be parsed on first sight by a typical couch-bound viewer -- a nearly subliminal effect -- is not necessarily a bad thing. ''Sometimes I don't even know if I care if they're seeing it,'' Tolkow says. It's an impression. Maybe they'll see more on the next viewing. A flashed image can be like a subtle allusion in a long poem, resonating just below the threshold of comprehension.
People who revile the evolution of a fast-paced and discontinuous cutting style -- and, for that matter, people who like it -- have a convenient three-letter shorthand for the principal villain: MTV.
Tony Schwartz, the veteran media consultant responsible for some of the most famous political spots of the last generation, says of his up-to-date colleagues, ''They see the stuff that's on MTV and they imitate that.'' Then again, Schwartz doesn't mind a quick commercial in its place. When CNN was new, and Ted Turner wanted shorter commercials to match the brisk pace of his two-minute newscasts, he turned to Schwartz, who took a set of 30-second spots and cut them down to 8 seconds, 7 seconds, 5 seconds. Recalling this, Schwartz looks at his watch and says, ''I could do a . . . let me see . . .'' -- apparently he is playing something back in his head -- ''three-second commercial that would outsell any of them.'' He feeds a cassette into a videotape player and, sure enough: one or two quick images plus a catch phrase. ''Got a headache? Come to Bufferin.'' ''You can see why Cascade's the better buy. Try Cascade.'' ''As long as you've been taking pictures, you've trusted them to one film.'' ''War and Peace'' it wasn't.
''The time frame of contemporary movies is astounding to me,'' says Annette Insdorf at Columbia. ''Many films of the past two or three years strike me as overly influenced by MTV. I suspect that there's a similarity of intention: namely, to create a visceral response that bypasses a thoughtful meditative process.'' Skip the thinking and deliver the buzz.
Customers demanded it, or so programmers believed. ''There was a point when I started working in this industry,'' Laura Tolkow recalls, ''when everyone would say: I want this to be like MTV.''
Over at MTV, they don't seem to feel terrible about this. A company fact sheet asserts, as a kind of slogan, ''MTV zooms by in a blur while putting things in focus at the same time.''
Music Television began broadcasting in the summer of 1981, with the Buggles singing, appropriately enough, ''Video Killed the Radio Star,'' followed by the Who, the Pretenders, Rod Stewart and others in hybrid blends of music, images of musicians performing and other rapidly intermixed images, real or surreal, related to the music or not, but always cut to the music. The basic MTV unit was a three-minute movie created around a song. You might have been forgiven for thinking it was meant as a sort of wallpaper, something to put on in the background when you didn't want to watch television. Wasn't it really a descendant of television's Yule Log, burning away eternally at Christmastime before a fixed camera while carols played on the audio track? Certainly the music video was premised on short attention spans. It is a three-minute format within which no single shot is likely to last more than a second or two.
Now MTV is one of America's foremost cultural exports, playing to 270 million households, including those reached by the Palapa C2 satellite over Southeast Asia, the Morelos 2 satellite over Mexico and Panama and the Sat 3 over South America. Besides music videos -- which have evolved into a fantastically crisp and artful genre -- the network has sent out its own talk shows, pick-a-date game shows and, most intriguingly, animated cartoons, like the famous, dimwitted, superironic Beavis and Butt-head.
The not-so-hidden premise of Beavis and Butt-head is that even music videos are slow-paced and boring, so you need an overlay of comic commentary. In their own way, though, Beavis and Butt-head are painfully slow -- MTV going conventional and letting story, rather than music, dictate the pace. The MTV animation style is deliberately static; it makes the typical Disney feature look like a madcap action film. The dialogue staggers along as if through dense mud, and the comedy relies heavily on pauses and reaction shots (so standardized that the animators call them by name: ''Wide-Eyed 1,'' ''Wide-Eyed 2,'' ''This Sucks''). ''We love pauses. Pauses are like, hey!'' says Yvette Kaplan, the supervising director, as a bit of tape makes its way through the editing room, a segment involving an impotency clinic.
''Oh, yeah,'' Butt-head is saying in the sequence now running over and over again through the editor's screen. ''Huh-huh. Me, too. Huh-huh. Maybe that place can help us score.''
Of all the visual arts, animation takes the tightest control of every fraction of every second. On carefully diagrammed sheets, each consonant and vowel of each word is assigned to its precise one-twenty-fourth-second frame. The characters' mouth movements have been reduced to an essential grammar of just 7 to 10 basic positions, enough to cover all English speech. This particular joke strikes the team in the editing room as . . . slow. There seems to be a lag in the line. ''The pacing is everything,'' Kaplan says. ''When it's flowing, it's just safer -- you don't have time to drift away and miss the humor.'' They delete the ''me, too'' and nudge the pace forward a bit more by deftly overlapping the final fraction of a second of the soundtrack with the visual track for the next scene. Alternatively, they might have jumped to the next scene's dialogue before cutting away visually, or they might have started the music for the next scene early -- clever pacing techniques that viewers have learned to interpret automatically and unconsciously.
''The audience has gotten more sophisticated, and you can take certain leaps without people scratching their heads,'' says Abby Terkuhle, the president of MTV animation. And of course, we're starting young. ''It's intuitive,'' he says. ''Our children are often not thinking about A, B, C. It's like, O.K., I'm there, let's go! It's a certain nonlinear experience, perhaps.''
Problem for the next generation: ''Movies at a theater take FOREVER to watch -- no fast forward,'' says a character in ''Microserfs,'' a 1995 novel by Douglas Coupland. ''And VCR rental movies take forever to watch, even using the FFWD button.'' The solution: ''This incredible timesaving secret: foreign movies with subtitles! It's like the crack cocaine equivalent of movies.'' You can watch even an art film in less than an hour. ''All you have to do is blast directly through to the subtitles, speed-read them, and then blip out the rest. It's so efficient it's scary.''
These are extreme countermeasures. More typically, when the pace of the sights and sounds coming from the screen leaves us hungry, we cope by adding layers. We multitask: watch television and eat and leaf through a magazine and do needlepoint. Or the programmers add the layers for us. VH1, the other major music-television network, has created a hit with an art form called Pop-Up Video: recycled music videos, in themselves now too slow or familiar to be captivating, overlaid with cartoon-style balloons as a side commentary on the main action. There can be dozens of them in a three-minute video, sometimes multiple balloons, containing quick jokes or historical facts or puns on the lyrics. Tina Turner sings ''Missing You,'' and a balloon pops up near her bare neck to explain, ''sternocleidomastoid muscle.'' Just in case you're bored. It's meta-entertainment, like the sideshows for people waiting in line at Disney World.
The finest example of meta-entertainment now playing -- recursive, self-consciously layered enrichment of the plodding movies of an ancient era -- is Mystery Science Theater 3000, a television show created in 1988 that has achieved cult status. The show runs decades-old B movies in the background while three fictional characters, silhouetted at the bottom of the screen, provide a running commentary of wisecracks. These bad old movies certainly leave plenty of time to fill, as the commentary occasionally points out:
''Could something please just happen?''
''I bet if these guys filmed 'Citizen Kane' it would have had a 20-minute sled sequence in it.''
''Let's take a 15-minute break. But, ah, keep the camera rolling.''
''Please remain seated until the movie grinds to a complete halt.''
Amid the jokes, the commentators sneak in some sophisticated analysis of film technique, old and new. Audiences and film makers alike have learned how much can be omitted from simple narrative sequences. ''When film was a new medium, they didn't know they could collapse time,'' says Michael J. Nelson, the show's head writer. ''There was a lot of padding.'' We no longer need to see the man getting out of the car, and closing the car door, and walking up the steps, and knocking, and entering. The camera can jump from car to living room without leaving us behind.
So Nelson and his colleagues bring these plodding, dormant movies back to life with their comic transplants. Yet, as a viewer himself he sometimes despairs. ''I've been nearly driven to madness by the pace of commercials and television, so I watch much less,'' he says. ''Not that I'm becoming a Luddite, but I'm withdrawing a little. It's style over substance.''
Film makers have experimented with speed almost from the beginning. The first films were one long shot, in real time before there was anything but real time. By the 1920's, though, Sergei Eisenstein was pioneering techniques of fast cutting that seem radical even today. ''Without even using a Movieola,'' says Walter Murch, who most recently edited ''The English Patient'' -- digitally, of course, on an Avid nonlinear system. ''Eisenstein did it blind, like putting together pieces of cloth on a tailor's table.'' Today he would have full-screen editing and playback at 24 or 30 frames per second, with 32 levels of undo/redo; a database for tracking footage; ready-made dissolves, wipes (diagonal, matrix or sawtooth), flips and flops, blowups and resizes, peels and pushes, conceals and squeezes -- and then there are color effects and motion effects (slow, fast, freeze-frame, reverse). Editors can drop single frames to create a subtly accelerated staccato feeling, or just to bring a news segment in at the precise 58 seconds required. All this technology has conspired to create breakneck production schedules in Hollywood and in newsrooms. Editors and directors differ about whether it has affected their art as well.
''The English Patient'' was last year's most famously languid movie -- an antidote to ''Speed'' -- but in its own way it relied on an audience preparedness for tricks of pace and time that might not have been possible even a few years ago. The film contains 40 different transitions forward and backward in time, into different people's memories. It uses a whole range of devices to pull the viewer along: visual dissolves and sound transitions, as when the rhythm of a key thrown on stone in a game of hopscotch weaves its way into the Arabic dance of the next scene. ''The fact that we got away with that convoluted a temporal landscape is astonishing,'' Murch says. ''Gradually we have found more and faster and better ways of articulating all that.''
We have come to understand speed. We may resent it as a substitute for suspense. (Hitchcock knew that suspense is slow; suspense is not the brilliantly fast-cut shower scene in ''Psycho,'' but rather Cary Grant carrying a glowing glass of milk up a flight of stairs that lasts, it seems, forever.) But we appreciate it, as a tool of storytelling or just as a bright challenge to our senses. We admire speed, and always have, as raw virtuoso performance -- Heifetz flashing through an encore piece, always just on the verge of breaking a string or flubbing a hemidemisemiquaver. True, allegros without adagios grow tiresome. Slow music can have its subtler kind of virtuosity, the weightlessness of a bicycle rider staying balanced while drifting to a halt. Gustav Mahler is supposed to have advised a young conductor: if you think you are boring your audience, slow down.
If there is an ultimate limit to the pace of entertainment, we must now be approaching it, just as Olympic sprinters are approaching, asymptotically, the human limit for the 100-meter dash. In some ways, we are past the limit. Many of the individual shots in a commercial or a music video or even a television news segment are at or below the threshold of perception. They qualify as subliminal. Editors are conscious of this; they know that sometimes they are paring shots down to a minimal number of one-twenty-fourth-second frames -- four, or two, or even one -- that will leave just a sensory glimmer in the viewer's brain. Any day now, lawyers will take note of the considerable quantities of television text -- including copyright notices and advertising fine print -- that flash by too fast for any human to read. The inexorable one-upmanship of movie action sequences has clearly left the laws of physics behind, and audiences are noticing.
The audiences, though, have themselves been altered. We are different creatures, psychologically speaking, from what we were a generation ago. ''If you look at a one-minute commercial from the 50's,'' says Barry Levinson, ''it seems forever. It seems so long it's like a show.'' Impatience that breaks out inside a minute-long time frame seems pathological. Certainly some psychologists and social critics worry about information overload, just as cardiologists worry about Type-A hurry sickness -- supported by plenty of anecdotal evidence and not much conclusive research. It seems that we, as viewers of mass entertainment, have lost some of our ability to sit on the porch and daydream as the clouds float by. It seems that we have gained an ability to process rapid and discontinuous visual images. It seems that we are quicker-witted. But have we, by way of compensation, traded away our capacity for deep concentration? No one knows for sure.
''We do suffer these days from a little bit of attention-deficit syndrome, whether it can be diagnosed or not,'' says Rick Wagonheim of R/Greenberg Associates, a leading creator of digital effects, from commercials to film title sequences. ''Are we smarter? Probably not. Are we able to absorb more information in a short time? Probably.'' Like it or not, commercials, combining 20 or 30 or more individual shots in as many seconds, are a caldron of new techniques. It's no wonder that so many film directors and editors are emerging with a background in both commercials and music videos: from Michael Bay, for example, the director of ''The Rock,'' and Hank Corwin, the editor for ''Natural Born Killers'' and other Oliver Stone films. Corwin, whose experimental style has given some critics headaches, dismisses them. ''They'd better get with it, because that's the way of the world,'' he says. ''There's a lot of crap out there, and you can't disregard that. But we're going into the millennium, and things are always moving, things are always changing, things are very kinetic.'' It's almost a matter of brain chemistry, he says. We're more sophisticated. We're like fighter pilots doing a panel scan, absorbing data from all our instruments at once.
''Our eye has quickened,'' says Michael Elliot of Mad River Post, who has edited groundbreaking commercials for Compaq, MCI, Reebok, Epson and others -- commercials with fast pace as a running theme as well as a technique. As you watch the quick montages, the shotgun blasts of shots from different angles, you can't help noticing the pathos of the soundtracks: men and women, at home and in the workplace, talking about their hectic lives, their need for timesaving, their hunger for speed, their fear of overload. ''It's always easier to back off from the velocity,'' Elliot says. ''It's easier to take your foot off the gas than put it on.''
Photos: No matter how fast a movie goes -- here, one second of the trailer for ''Men in Black'' -- it's not fast enough. Scenes speed by so fast they've left the laws of physics behind. (Photographs from RIGA, Los Angeles); Even the languid movie ''The English Patient'' relied on tricks of pace and time, moving backward and forward in the characters' memories, as in the frames shown above. (Photographs copyright $; 1996 Saul Zaentz Company); The Electronic Gallery: Vito Acconci -- Assuming that the technology of the late 20th century has devalued material space; assuming that space, in the early 21st century, is not ''in place'' but ''in mind''; assuming that computers and E-mail have reintroduced and revised and revitalized ''writing'' -- what we have produced is a page that becomes building, lines of text that bend and fold into buildings, a city built up out of words. In the beginning there was the word, but then again, it's only words. (Acconci Studio: Vito Acconci, Celia Imrey, Dario Nunez, Saija Singer and Luis Vera)