Is Boredom a Good Thing? (for Film buffs and seekers)

I thought this was interesting and profound and honestly, something I struggle with every day. ie; making sure that I take a little quiet time. No computer, no music playing, not TV, no iPhone, etc... It's interesting how broad and narrow this concept can be intertwined with our everyday life. This below applies more specifically Film and was taken from Scott Macaulay's letter from the editor in Filmmaker Magazine .
"I was reading Bob Lefsetz’s email yesterday and came across this:"It's hard to make sense of the world. Used to be there was a dearth of information. I remember going to college and being bored. That would be impossible today. What with every movie and song ever created at my fingertips on the Internet. But with so much information available, people are overwhelmed. They can't make sense of it." I'm old enough to remember being bored too -- those times when there really was nothing on, when your record collection seemed sucky, when that one alternative radio show that turned you onto the new stuff wasn't on for another six days. You needed a media fix, a blast of something inspiring in its newness, and you simply couldn’t get it. You were bored.

Of course, there are other forms of boredom. There are the deeper, more soul-crushing, more existentially challenging sorts. And then there’s the boredom of some great art. I remember being in a college lit class with the late, great Edward Said. The book assigned was Henry James' The Europeans, and none of us had read it. Said exploded at our sloth before finally admitting, "Look, it's a very boring book, I know, but it’s a great book, an important book."

Lefsetz's comment struck me because I've just come back from a film festival and it made me think of the relationship between boredom and cinephilia. I saw lots of great, non-boring films in Toronto. I especially liked Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan, Danny Boyle's 127 Hours, Jerzy Skolimowski's Essential Killing, Sophie Fiennes' Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow and Tran Anh Hung's adaptation of Haruki Murikami's Norwegian Wood. None of these films were boring. But I did see some films that were. There were boring films that by not insistently foregrounding a narrative deliberately allowed the viewer to drift in his own mind, like some Situationist "speculative pleasureseeker" exploring the streets of a city. And then there were the films whose subject matters were important ones, and making them flashier and more entertaining would have been untruthful. I may have been a little bored but I respected the sobriety of the filmmakers and was happy they didn’t cheapen their material.

My point here is that if you are scared of boredom, or if your neural pathways have been so rewired that you need fixes of "interesting," then it's hard to discover new cinema. It's hard to be a cinephile if you need narrative excitement in every thing you see, and it's hard to be excited about finding new work if you don't accept boredom as the cost of doing business. Of course, you can wait for everyone else to tell you what's good and only see that, but to sift through the unfamiliar to find that life-changing gem you have to be prepared to spend time with yourself, to allow what's on screen to trigger thoughts in yourself, and to suspend what I fear is an increasingly prevalent reflex to reach for your iPhone or, worse, leave the theater or turn the channel. To quote Aldous Huxley, "Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty -- his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom when it comes, not merely philosophically but almost with pleasure."

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