Why old films feel different

There is a kind of patience in them that newer films rarely allow.

A scene is permitted to simply exist for a while before it justifies itself. The camera trusts you to be bored for ten seconds. That trust is the texture.

• Fewer cuts per minute
• Faces held longer than comfortable
• Silence used as a material, not a gap to fill

I don't think it's nostalgia. I think it's a different theory of the viewer's attention — one that assumed attention was a thing you gave, not a thing to be captured.