Short Film: An Overview

Abhijit Guha

The short film is a great first step for a budding filmmaker. That’s how I made my beginnings, and Oberhausen was an important step on my path to become a director. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Short_Film_Festival_Oberhausen accessed on 14.12.2024). —Roman Polanski

Short films do not enjoy the same status in the world of movies like short stories in literature. The short stories by Nikolai Gogol, Anton Chekhov, Guy de Maupassant and Rabindranath Thakur are better known than short films made by Taika Waititi,1 Andrea Arnold,2 Nacho Vigalondo,3 Marshall Curry4 and Kartiki Gonsalves5 who are little known names. They made great short films. Andrea Arnold, a British short filmmaker, for example, had won an Academy Award for her short film Wasp in 2005. Charlie Chaplin made a good number of short films, like Behind the Screen (23 minutes), A Busy Day (6 minutes), The Masquerader (13 minutes) and many others. In India, Satyajit Ray also directed short films. Ray’s famous short films among others are Two (12 minutes) and The Inner Eye (20 minutes). Recently, the documentary short film from India. The Elephant Whisperers (39 minutes) made by Kartiki Gonsalves won the Oscar in 2023, at the 95th Academy Awards Film Festival held at Hollywood, Los Angeles. Serious research on short films has also begun with surveys on the audience and revealed that ‘Various people have different ideas of time, and for some, a 20-minute short film is a long time... In less than half an hour, the Oscar-winning short films examine one strong social topic issue after another. Even if it isn’t an Oscar-winning short film, a short film can teach you to think’ (Jia 2023). [Analysis of Short Film from the Perspective of Filmmakers and Audiences. [Jia, Lu (2023). Analysis of Short Film from the Perspective of Filmmakers and Audiences. The International Conference on Interdisciplinary Humanities and Communication Studies DOI: 10.54254/2753-7064/3/2022978].

Among the oldest film festivals dedicated to short films are Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, France (since 1979), the Tampere Film Festival, Finland (since 1969), and International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany (since 1954). All of them are among the most important short film festivals in the world.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences defines a short film as “an original motion picture that has a running time of not more than 40 minutes including all credits”. (https://www.oscars.org/sites/oscars/files/202404/97th_oscars_ complete_rules.pdf accessed on 04.12.2024)

Documentaries are regarded as short films. In 2019 The 91st Academy Awards Committee defined a documentary film: An eligible documentary film is defined as a theatrically released nonfiction motion picture dealing creatively with cultural, artistic, historical, social, scientific, economic or other subjects. It may be photographed in actual occurrence, or may employ partial reenactment, stock footage, stills, animation, stop-motion or other techniques, as long as the emphasis is on fact and not on fiction (https://www.oscars.org/sites/oscars/files/91aa_short_subject.pdf accessed on 03.12.2024).

So, all documentaries are short films but all short films are not documentaries. Documentaries are non-fictional.

In a recent period, a new subfield named visual anthropology has been growing within anthropology which has an interesting past. It began with a famous film named Nanook of the North (1922), which is a feature length documentary depicting the life of the Inuit people (popularly known as the Eskimos) of the Arctic region by a non-anthropologist director Robert Flaherty. It was screened by Midnapore Film Society. Gradually, making of films on anthropological subjects increased and anthropologists are currently engaged in a dual activity: (i) making films and (ii) analysing existing films through an anthropological lens (Chio, Jenny. (2021) 2023. (“Visual anthropology”. In The Open Encyclopaedia of Anthropology, edited by Felix Stein. Facsimile of the first edition in The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Anthropology. http://doi.org/10.29164/21visual accessed on 04.12.2024).

It is not only in anthropology but short films are gradually gaining popularity all over the world on the silver screen. Let Midnapore Film Society be a pioneer in propagating short films. This writer wishes a long life of short films.

Reference:
1     TaikaWaititi (b.1975) is a New Zealand filmmaker, actor and comedian. Waititi’s 2003 short film Two Cars, One Night earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Live Action Short Film.
2    Andrew Arnold (b.1961) is an English filmmaker and former actress.
3    Nacho Vigalondo (b.1977) is a Spanish film maker. His eight minutes duration short film 7:35 in the Morning was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Short Film.
4    Marshall Curry (b.1970) is an American film maker. His short film A Night at the Garden was nominated for theAcademy Award for Best Documentary in 2017.
5       KartikiGonsalves (b.1986) is an Indian film director.

(The author is grateful to Midnapore Film Society (estd. in 1963) which circulated this article on the occasion of the Ritwik Ghatak Short Film Festival organized by the Society during 7-8 December 2024 at Midnapore.)
[Former Professor in Anthropology, Vidyasagar University.
E-mail: aguhavu@gmail.com]