The long history of short films

In the beginning, all films were short. The earliest cinema audiences may not have been particularly aware of this as they marvelled at seconds-long scenes of circus performers, exotic cities, scantily clad ladies and people going about their daily business. For them, the novelty and the thrill of witnessing man’s latest technological triumph was paramount. But as the 20th century dawned, films began to get longer.

The very first films were presented to the public in 1894 through Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope, a peepshow-like device for individual viewing. These, and the projected films that succeeded them, were often one-shot “actuality” or “interest” films depicting celebrities, royal processions, travelogues, current affairs and scenes from everyday life. The best-known film from this time is perhaps the Lumière brothers’ Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1895), which supposedly had audiences fleeing in terror as a celluloid locomotive hurtled towards them.

The brevity of these one-shot films suited Victorian modes of presentation. As Bryony Dixon, the BFI national archive’s silent film curator and director of the British Silent Film Festival, explains: “The major outlets for entertainment at that time were music halls and fairgrounds, where programmes were made up of a variety of different acts lasting up to about 20 minutes. Most early films imitated other entertainment media already in existence: magic lantern shows, illustrations, variety acts, tableaux presentations. So short was the norm.”

But in the early 1900s, improvements in recording and editing technology allowed film-makers to produce longer, multi-shot films. Some of the most memorable longer short films from the pre-features era include Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon (1902) – in which a group of astronomers build an improbable space ship and encounter some acrobatic moon men – and Edwin S Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903), often celebrated as the first Western.

From about 1910 onwards, studio competition and audience demand induced film-makers to make even longer, multi-reel films and the first features were born. While DW Griffith’s controversial Ku Klux epic The Birth of a Nation (1915) has gone down in popular memory as the first feature film, it was in fact preceded by several feature-length multi-reelers from Italy, France, Denmark and the United States, including George Loane Tucker’s equally controversial Traffic in Souls (1913), which dealt with white slavery and prostitution.

Features were regarded as more respectable than shorts. Their length and narrative complexity allowed them to be compared more favourably with theatre and opera than with the base pleasures of the fairground. They could draw in better-paying, middle-class crowds and helped to fund the construction of increasingly lavish “picture palaces” over the next three decades.

While the star attraction of these purpose-built cinemas was undoubtedly the feature film, revue-like programming generally prevailed and shorts continued to be shown alongside news reels and sometimes live acts. This was still the case up to and including the Second World War, when short films took on additional roles as government propaganda.

Dr Richard Farmer, an expert in British wartime cinema-going at University College London, sees the period between 1939 and 1945 as “something of a high-water mark for the short film in Britain”, though not everybody liked them. “While the government was extraordinarily keen to place its messages in British cinemas, cinema managers and patrons were much more ambivalent,” he says.

“Some short films, especially those that showed British servicemen actively fighting the war, proved to be very popular, but there were also concerns that the cinema would gain a reputation as an 'interfering marm’ if it dedicated too much time to short government films and not enough to the [predominantly American] feature films upon which the magic of the pictures rested.”

SHORT-LIVED SUCCESS

This uneasy juxtaposition between the escapism of Hollywood features and the informative (and some might say sanctimonious) nature of many shorts was certainly instrumental in their demise in cinemas throughout the Fifties and Sixties.

Chris Hilton, the former general manager at the Odeon Leicester Square, began working in cinemas in 1966 and recalls the unpopularity of some of these documentary shorts: “In the Sixties, you would still occasionally get short films in the programme, things like the Rank Organisation’s Look at Life series [which depicted scenes of 'Swinging Britain’]. But most of these were pretty boring and the audience used to use them as an excuse to pop to the loo or get some more popcorn.”

Financially motivated changes to cinema programming – cramming several screening sessions into one evening and including more trailers and adverts – also played their part in ousting the short. By the end of the Sixties, short films were all but absent from commercial cinema programmes, although short cartoons continued to be shown at the start of children’s films until the late Eighties.

SHORT CONCEPTS

While shorts may have fallen out of favour with commercial cinemas, their popularity has never waned among visual artists, who first started experimenting with them in the Twenties. Film has always been the enfant terrible of the art world – some critics still dispute whether it should be considered as art at all – so it is perhaps unsurprising that some of the more rebellious artists of the past hundred years have been keen to embrace it.

These include Surrealists such as Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí – whose eyeball-slicing Un Chien Andalou (1929) remains iconic to this day; Sixties avant-gardists such as Agnes Varda and Chris Marker in France, and Andy Warhol in the US; and more recent video artists such as Bruce Nauman and Steve McQueen.

Nathaniel Mellors is one of the most innovative multimedia artists working in Britain today and recently created a short film representing “contemporary art” for the BBC’s The Seven Ages of Britain series. He says he finds working with short films liberating: “Artists aren’t held back by the production values required for cinema or television. And they usually haven’t studied film in any academic sense, so they often bring a different frame of reference, like conceptual art, performance or painting to their work – for better or for worse”.

VIDEO STARS

Since 1981 and the birth of MTV, music videos have also represented an alternative outlet for short film-makers. Tim Pope, who has directed videos for musicians as diverse as the Cure, the Bangles and Neil Young, believes that the music video created a new type of short film-making.

“With a music video, the narrative follows the rhythm of the song so there’s much less freedom. I was always very careful not to impose my need to make a movie on to the video,” he says.

Pope also believes that the rhythmic fast-paced style of editing associated with music videos has fed back into other types of film-making, including shorts, and that this in turn has changed the way in which people consume and appreciate film: “In the Eighties, I used to get told off by MTV for cutting my videos too fast. But I think people these days can take in a lot more a lot quicker. Music videos have definitely influenced the look and the language of film-making in general.”

The Nineties were a landmark decade for short film-making thanks to the arrival of affordable – and later digital – recording equipment, which was lightweight and easy to use. This led to an upsurge in independent film-making, particularly of shorts, which are generally cheaper and less demanding to make than features.

Martina Amati, who won a Bafta this year for her short film I Do Air, began working with video around this time and is now a staunch proponent of the benefits of digital. “With digital, you can go straight from shooting to editing on a computer. This makes it much more practical and affordable, and you can achieve intimate and spontaneous performances,” she says.

Philip Ilson, director of the London Short Film Festival, also began making and showing short films in the mid-Nineties and refers to this era as “the year zero period”. “All of a sudden it was cheap and easy to make films. It was the same for screenings. It was the first time when a portable video projector could be set up anywhere with a sheet on the wall to screen stuff on,” he says.

A RENAISSANCE

Shorts have always been treated as something of a poor cousin to features at major film festivals such as Venice and Cannes. But the ability to screen films easily and cheaply has spawned hundreds of dedicated short film festivals and companies around the world. These have flourished over the years, finding innovative new ways – from warehouse parties to live music and performance collaborations – to present short films to an eager and ever-growing audience.

But the biggest new demand for short films has undoubtedly come from the internet. “We have a million views a month on YouTube,” says Fabien Riggall, founder and creative director of short film company Future Shorts, “and that’s just through word of mouth and social media. I think people today are really interested in bite-sized pieces of information.”

This “bite-sizeness” of shorts makes them ideally suited to the internet, where users demand short, sharp bursts of entertainment that they can consume on the fly at work, at home or, increasingly, on their mobile phones. YouTube is by the far the most popular viewing platform for shorts online and its most frequently viewed shorts include a cathartic Spanish drama about how to deal with being dumped (Whatever You Want to Hear) and a charming animation about a suicidal kiwi (Kiwi!). Both went viral after being shared on Facebook and Twitter, and have received millions of views each.

The internet is also proving to be a popular alternative for short film-makers who can’t afford to distribute their films on DVD. Cindy Rose, the executive director of digital entertainment at Virgin Media – who is supporting this supplement, and champion up-and-coming short film talent via their website (www.virginmediashorts.com) and annual short film competition – says that the biggest benefit of the internet to film-makers is being able to post films online “without spending a penny”. “They can get potentially thousands, in some cases millions, of views in a short time. It’s a great way of reaching new audiences,” she says.

Even Hollywood directors are starting to release their films online. Spike Jonze – director of Being John Malkovich and Where the Wild Things Are – recently launched his latest short, I’m Here, on a purpose-built website (www.imheremovie.com).

Short films have come a long way since the days of the Lumières’ Train. Today, they come in all shapes and sizes, and can last anything from a few seconds to about 40 minutes.

But short film consumption has, in a sense, come full circle. For all the technological advancement of the past 116 years, solitary viewing on the internet is not so far removed from Edison’s Kinetoscope and the multimedia programming often used by short film promoters mirrors the variety shows of yesteryear.

The films themselves may have become more sophisticated, but perhaps the very shortness of shorts makes them ideally suited to more transitory forms of exhibition, as the Victorians and Edwardians well understood.

While it is doubtful that short films will stage a comeback in commercial cinemas – excepting the delightful animated shorts screened before Pixar features – we are living in a very exciting time for short films. And as newer, easier, cheaper means of making, distributing and watching films become available, their current popularity is unlikely to be short-lived.