Jonathan Rosenbaum

Opening Keynote

The importance of the short film is in some ways equivalent to the importance of the exceptionally long film. In both cases we're talking about films that evade the relatively arbitrary industrial standard imposed by the so-called feature film and the complex set of practices, rules, prohibitions, and imperatives attached to this tradition. The wide-ranging art of cinema expands well beyond such a standard, and short films are among the most precious casualties of that bias.

Let's not forget that short films existed before features did. It's also pertinent to recall that marketing interests tend to define most versions of film history that we encounter rather than the interests of either filmmakers or spectators. Jean-Luc Godard pointed this out in his Deux fois cinquante ans de cinema français (1995) when he observed that the "100 years of cinema" being celebrated at the time was a matter of exhibition rather than filmmaking, which is why projectors were being emphasized rather than cameras. In any case, it's precisely the difficulties of packaging and presenting short films that lead to their being marginalized and neglected. The frequent gear changes we have to make during programs of short films, whether they're devoted to the same or to different filmmakers, are quite unlike the prolonged submersion we experience with features.

One of the key issues that should be addressed at the outset of this discussion is whether we can make ontological distinctions of the kind that Frank O'Connor makes in his book The Lonely Voice between short stories and novels. Is there a difference between the concepts of time employed in each, or merely a difference in duration?

Jonathan Rosenbaum is film critic for the "Chicago Reader". His books include: "Midnight Movies" (with J. Hoberman, 1987), "Greed" (1991), "Moving Places" (1995), "Placing Movies" (1995), "Movies as Politics" (1997), "Dead Man" (BFI, 2000), "Movie Wars" (2000), "Abbas Kiarostami" (with Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, 2003), "Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia" (edited with Adrian Martin, 2003) and "Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons" (2004).