Rod Stoneman

The Death of the Short

The origins of the short are the origins of cinema itself, and its death is likewise linked. All film inhabited short formats for its first formative decades and early film still has an important relationship with experimental film-making (which was brought into focus by the extraordinary rediscoveries at the FIAF archive conference in Brighton in 1978). As Thomas Elsaesser put it in Early Cinema Space Frame Narrative "The rediscovery of the 'primitives' seemed like a vindication of the avant garde's fifty year struggle to rethink the foundations of film language and dispel the idea that the cinema's turn to fictional narrative or adoption of illusionist representational forms was its inevitable destiny."

As cinema developed and refined feature length forms, shorts continued a life to the side of mainstream modes, they developed both their narrative specificity and their osmosis with other movements in the arts. Surrealism had its influence from Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali's Le Chien Andalou to Jean Vigo, Man Ray and Maya Deren. Elsewhere there were rich abstract explorations as diverse as Oscar Fischinger and Viking Eggeling, Len Lye and Norman McLaren.

The birth of the film school in the post war era, notably in Eastern Europe, led to early short work by Roman Polanski, Jiri Mendel and Andrej Tarkovski. Today the short has a major role in the vocational transition from film school to industry, it is a crucial calling card, a display of credentials and potentials.

That tradition of utilising the short as an area for play adjacent to the main work of feature film makers is still evident in recent films such as Not I by Neil Jordan or Two Nudes Bathing by John Boorman or Le Batteur du Bolero by Patrice Leconte. Compilation films in cinema (Loin du Vietnam, Deutschland im Herbst and 11'09"01 - September 11) and television series (Dazzling Image, Ghosts in the Machine and Midnight Underground, would be examples from a historical version of Channel 4) also support this.

However as we approach contemporary film culture there is a reduction in the role of the short as an oppositional or critical form in the public domain. Perhaps the clearest example would be the lost opportunity of the pop promo. Instead of a ludic and visual space for brave film-making, an aggressive commercialisation took place eliminating the wider prospects for imagination and diversity in the video clip.

The most watched short narratives would be the mini-narratives of advertisements and the expositions of the news / factual television - there is a predominance of ideologically foreshortened forms in the audio visual domain. My sense is that the specious and the trivial that pervades television is now in danger of predominating in the area of short fiction making too.

Of course good films are always made, but perhaps these are rarer and more exceptional now. Marketing is a self-fulfilling prophecy and in a gradual and uneven way has had its effect on taste. Across the last few decades mass marketing has predicated an increasingly limited version of cinema and has shifted audience taste towards it. Any context for discussion about the health of the short film should examine the relationship between the cultural cocoon of a film festival and distribution of films to wider audiences. What are the current encouragements for work which challenges conventional forms or received political understandings? How does the global image system function and what is the potential for wider diversity within it?

Rod Stoneman is the Director of the Huston School of Film & Digital Media at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He was Chief Executive of Bord Scann‡n na hƒireann / the Irish Film Board until September 2003 and previously a Deputy Commissioning Editor in the Independent Film and Video Department at Channel 4 Television. He has made a number of documentaries for television and written on film in various magazines including: Screen, Sight and Sound, Kinema and Film Ireland.