When film critics want to dismiss a new Hollywood production with one flip of the wrist, the metaphor of choice is "eye candy." The phrase evokes addiction of a peculiarly infantile sort. The masses like the movie. The people can't help themselves. But ask your friends what eye candy means, in cinematic terms, and you'll likely get blank stares. "Well," one might offer, hesitantly, "it looks like a music video."

This reasoning is absurd. Hardly the demonic malignancies critics make them out to be, music videos are the most experimental form of filmmaking accessible to the general public. With basic cable or a high-speed Internet connection, viewers have access to a dizzying array of short films by both emerging and established directors. The music-video genre has conventions, just like any other art form, but these features are no more intrinsically dangerous than the tabloid format of your favorite alternative weekly.

Particularly nasty insinuations surround the rapid-fire editing preferences of music-video directors. Attention deficit disorder, the nightly news tells us, is on the rise in the generation of children raised on MTV. Short attention spans and a constant need for visual stimulation deter children from reading the books their brains need to grow big and strong. Rot, I say.

The long take that opens Orson Welles' Touch of Evil lasts for over three minutes, but this is no compliment to your attention span (more like an ode to the director's own talent, but that's another story). It may seem counterintuitive at first, but a 90-minute narrative film is actually friendlier to the short attention span than is a three-minute music video. A narrative feature invests all its energy in hooking you into the story, forcing you to empathize with its characters through techniques like the eyeline match, where a shot of a character looking offscreen is followed by a presentation of the view that character is presumably staring at. Talk about a spoon feed. Now you are that character.

The formal codes that bind music videos are slight compared to those that govern the creation of feature films. While characters and plots are certainly within the music video's reach, they are not crucial to its success. In setting aside these structuring devices, music-video directors can challenge the assumed limitations of the medium, and the viewer.

Editing devices that are characteristic of the music-video form can be both brilliant and imbecilic. The current Ours video in regular rotation on MTV 2 is an example of the latter. It features one of the most popular music-video edits, a shot of the lip-synching performer intercut with a dramatically lit inanimate object, in this case a scale. The director attempts to imbue the character's mental state with the aura of judgment that surrounds a scale. The technique is worthwhile--it's just this sort of associative reasoning that is frowned upon for the imagination-colonizing purposes of narrative film. The symbolism, however, is melodramatic and tired. A better example of innovative music-video editing is Garth Jennings' new video for R.E.M.'s "Imitation of Life." Freed from the narrative requirements of a traditional film, Jennings is able to capture 20 seconds of a poolside party, treating each incident that happens during that period in detail, and allowing the characters to backpedal and make different choices if a different outcome is desired. Taking its cue from the seminal music video "Breakaway," by Bruce Connor (in which the visual component of the film plays again backwards as soon as the song ends), and echoing the weaving omniscience of Virginia Woolf's dinner party in To the Lighthouse, Jennings' work accomplishes something rare indeed: the music video that takes advantage of its formal liberty by challenging, rather than exploiting, its audience. (The surest way to test an attention span is to give it options.)

From Connor's A Movie to Sadie Benning's A New Year, avant-garde films have been contributing to and benefiting from the artistic innovations of music videos for as long as they've been around. Hopefully, the rising tide of access to these and other works will rescue the reputation of rapid-fire editing from its relegation to the cellar of critical condescension and allow it to be recognized for what it is: the new language we've all been waiting for.