Christian Höller

3 Minute Cinema You Can Dance To (On the Relationship Between Pop Culture and Short Film)

Over the past 50 years (and more), short film and pop culture, especially music, have developed an intricate relationship with each other. The ways in which short filmic formats have engaged with musical pieces have not only been extraordinarily rich and complex during that period, but they also brought a particular syn-aesthetic sensibility to the fore. Dating back as early as the 1920's and 30's, attempts were made to invent moving imageries that were both "translations" and autonomous extensions of the music pieces they were set to. Throughout the 1940's and 50's, songs or short instrumentals were providing blueprints onto which narrative as well as experimental imageries could be projected. From the mid 1960's onwards, the short filmic format known as the "music clip" (or music video proper) started to develop into all sorts of aesthetic and stylistic directionsÐa development that brought about immense creative differentiation, as well as (at times) numbing and paralyzing standstill. Today, it almost appears as if music-related short film, after having gone through manifold stages of pop-cultural expansion, is moving out of the "pop realm" finding more hospitable territory in regions apart from, or marginal to it. At least its edgier and more daring approaches seem to head into that direction. By reexamining certain key moments in the long historical crisscross of pop music and shorts, two main questions are to be considered: In what ways is music (still) to be considered as a determining factor of short film production? And why is it that shorts have been playing such a vital and expansive role in formatting pop-cultural subjectivities?

As an editor of Springerin magazine www. springerin.at, Christian Höller has long been interested in the cross-over territories between art, film, video, pop culture and other fields. Having written extensively on such cross-over issues,Christian ended up curating the 10 part special program "Pop Unlimited? Image Transfer in Contemporary Pop Culture" at Oberhausen in 2000.