Short and Shiny

In the wake of the YouTube generation, short films are certainly popular. So what’s behind the absence of short film seasons at chain cinemas? It’s a silent battle but one that thankfully some are still fighting for. Short film label Future Shorts claim to be a company that “passionately believe in developing a wider audience for short film”. But why do most chain cinemas seem so reluctant to latch onto the medium as a whole?
With an expansive programme of shorts at this year’s festival,perhaps it’s finally time for the underdog to shine. UK SHORTS 1, (the first of the shorts programmes) screened yesterday (Thursday 18), and were introduced as “the more serious selection of the three UK collections being screened at the festival”. With six films screened in succession: HAND GUM, TRIP, K, RIPPLE, VEILS and TIDE, the shorts ranged in length from between four and twenty minutes. The selection of films for the programme made for a compelling (and at times very uncomfortable) viewing experience, equally as rich as any feature-length contribution.
So what is it that makes cinemagoers shy away from short films? Perhaps it’s that audiences strugggle to feel a connection with the characters of short films. It is certainly possible that they feel cheated that they do not get to share a journey with characters for any longer than the length of a single episode of a television series. What some short films present are transitory glimpses of characters’ lives, but surely this is the beauty of the medium itself. Short films need not allow for a gradual alignment with anything, be it other characters or their accompanying surroundings.
The result of this produces work that is much more challenging for its viewers in that they must engage immediately with the onscreen events, or face missing out on the fleeting nature of each short. As Wes Anderson successfully demonstrated in THE DARJEELING LIMITED, preceded by its prologue short HOTEL CHEVALIER, shorts are fully capable of functioning as standalone contributions to cinema, but can also work well when coupled with feature-lengths, that allow audiences to delve deeper into the journeys of the characters first introduced to audiences in their ‘short film’ forms.
In a Q&A after the UK SHORTS 1 screening, RIPPLE producer, Richard Batty claimed that music is often the key to a short film, that it can provide great inspiration for a short, and is often “the starting point for a whole project”. Such a statement suggests that short films come to rest in the middle ground, convening somewhere between music videos and their feature-length counterparts. Hopefully, short film is on the rise, with renowned feature length filmmakers uniting on projects such as PARIS JE T’AIME (2006), a collection of shorts directed by the likes of the Coen Brothers, Gus Van Sant and Walter Salles. A sequel anthology paying its respects to another great city, NEW YORK, I LOVE YOU is set to follow later this year.
So is short film becoming more recognised as a medium in its own right? The absence of audience members at screenings suggests that while short film is potentially on the up, it still has a long way to go before it’s as popular as its feature-length brothers and sisters.

Laura J Smith