It’s nothing new to note that the rise of streaming services has the potential to unleash the screen artwork from its standard length and form. The television documentary maker Adam Curtis, for example, long ago embraced iPlayer rather than linear television for his films, because on the streaming platform they would find a home away from the “rigid formats and schedules of network television”. In 2015, his film Bitter Lake, about the banal narratives imposed on a complex world by reductive world leaders, occupied two hours and 20 minutes – more time than he would have been allotted by even the most indulgent channel controller.
In audio, podcasting has long liberated itself from the tight, clock-regulated schedules of radio. James Cameron, the director of Avatar and Titanic, has now mooted a world in which there is further freedom from time constraints: he imagines movies with a long-form version made for streaming, and a…