In honor of the Oscar Nominated short films, about to be playing in an arthouse near you (provided you live in a major American city), I thought I’d write a little something about the short. The very first movies were shorts – one spool of film, which depending on the hand cranked speed of the camera, amounted to about sixty seconds worth of exposure. Such were the films that the Lumiere Brothers screened for an audience on December 28, 1895, often considered the birthday of the movies.

For many years after that, all movies continued to be shorts, though they became far more advanced once fledgling filmmakers began experimenting with editing techniques. D.W. Griffith directed more than 400 short films between 1908 and 1912, inventing much of modern film language in the process. Short films were on the losing side in the battle for the moving picture market waged between the earliest moguls, like Thomas Edison, and the upstarts who eventually supplanted them, like Adolph Zukor. One of the main weapons in the upstarts’ arsenal was the feature film. They guessed correctly that movie audiences had a thirst for longer, more developed stories.

But the short film never went away. It existed as a popular comedy form for several more decades, and then found a warm welcome on the small screen. Cartoons, documentaries, educational films – all have made great use of the short film. And there has continued to be the occasional short which breaks out of the shadows and becomes a force on its own – from Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou (the most famous short of all time) to Chris Marker’s La Jetee to Larry Yust’s The Lottery, the short film has never really left us.

Recently, with the combined advent of cheaper production equipment and expanded distribution avenues, the short has made a significant comeback. You can screen movies of all lengths through multiple online sources, and that trend shows no indication of slowing down.

Here is a brief sampling of some of the many flavors of the short film. I am restricting the field to movies under 15 minutes released after World War II. No real reason – just to make life simpler.

Oh, and by no means do I consider this a “best of” list. Let’s just refer to it five favorites. My own personal favorites, because, well, I’m the one writing it.

THE ANIMATED

One Froggy Evening (1955, Chuck Jones)

This is probably the most well-known movie on the list, at least if you are a fan of cartoons. Created by arguably the greatest American maker of short animated films for Warner Brothers, it showcases all of Jones’ inventive brilliance. It is a simple story (as are most shorts) about a man who finds a singing frog and has dreams of riches. But the frog is not the most cooperative of performers, and Jones spins out seven glorious minutes built on this conflict. It is a perfectly structured story (indeed, I used to use it as an example of three act story structure for beginning screenwriting students), and it is filled with marvelous visual details that create indelible characters and move the plot along. Plus, it has songs – no dialogue, but songs, including the famous Michigan Rag. Michigan J. Frog, like Renee Falconetti before him, would disappear from movies after his miraculous debut, only to crop up in the occasional cameo, and eventually as the mascot of the WB Network. But his seven minutes of brilliance secures him a place in the hearts of many a film fan.

THE AVANT-GARDE

Go! Go! Go! (1962-64, Marie Menken)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3PvFohWfPo

I cannot prove this, but I am going to say that there have been more experimental short films produced over the past 125 years than films from any other genre. Every kid who picks up and camera and presses the shutter release is essentially making an experimental short. Though “experimental” and “avant-garde” aren’t exactly the same thing, that spirit of experimentation finds its home in the avant-garde. There have been plenty of long (even very long) avant-garde movies, but shorts are where they thrive. Picking a favorite is an impossible task, but I’m picking one anyway. Marie Menken, and her husband Willard Maas, were at the forefront of post-war American avant-garde. They founded the Gryphon Group, a prime incubator for short films in New York, and were instrumental in helping launch the career of Stan Brakhage. Menken was always fascinated by movement (one of her early films, Hurry Hurry, features swimming sperm in the leading roles) and in the early ‘60s, she travelled around New York capturing it on film wherever she could. She put these clips together in a frenetic stop motion rhythm, creating a marvelous contemplation of motion, as well as a valuable piece of archival history, documenting New York in the early ‘60s in much the same way Dziga Vertov did capturing contemporary Russia in the late ‘20s. I have seen it both silent and with a jazzy soundtrack. Either way, it is an exhilarating ride.

THE UNDERSERVED

The Horse (1973, Charles Burnett)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtegp4_anos

Movies cost a lot of money. They require equipment and specialized technical education. Sure, novices with shoestring budgets are capable of creating quality cinema, but the odds are stacked against them. Working in the short film genre limits expense and therefore becomes a useful training ground. When Charles Burnett was studying film at UCLA, he made a couple of short movies before beginning his first feature, Killer of Sheep. The last of these shorts is a simple and profoundly poignant movie about a boy and horse – and about compassion, and family, and the very nature of life and death. It is not technically innovative, but Burnett was nonetheless helping create a revolution. It was a revolution of content – an attempt by young African American filmmakers to create stories about the people they knew and lived with. Not about the stylized gangsters or domestics who generally populated American movie screens throughout most of American movie history. They were dubbed the L.A. Rebellion, and if The Horse is not the preeminent example of what they would become, it points the direction in fourteen beautifully composed minutes.

THE STYLIZED

Blue City (1997, David Birdsell)

I am not claiming that David Birdsell’s student film is the best short film ever made. I’m just saying it is my favorite. A beautiful, mysterious, and haunting examination of the vagaries of life and death. The ingredients are simple. A depressed aging man, a kid with a basketball, and two car thieves of questionable competence. Oh, and a stick of chalk. That is important. The “blue” in the title comes from the filter Birdsell films through, which renders the entire story in a blue haze, but it really refers to a state of mind. For me, this constitutes one of the purest forms of cinema – a narrative which relies almost entirely on image and action (there is minimal dialogue) to both tell a story and create an indelible mood. I find myself revisiting it at least once a year, and since it is only 12 minutes long, that is supremely easy.

THE PORTMANTEAU

Loin du 16e, from Paris, je t’aime (2006, Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas)

The first, and best, of Emmanuel Benbihy’s “Cities of Love” franchise, Paris, je’taime offered up 18 short films, each set in a different Paris arrondissement, and featured such internationally famous directors as Alfonso Cuaron, Oliver Assayas, Tom Tykwer, Wes Craven, and the Coen Brothers. Out of all of them, the Brazilian directors’ collaboration on a simple little story about anonymous caretakers, has stayed with me the longest. Catalina Sandino Moreno, fresh on the heels of her Oscar nomination for Maria Full of Grace, plays a young mother who sings a lullaby to her child before leaving the baby in day care, then travels a very long way to her job, caring for the child of a rich woman. The movie concludes with her singing the same lullaby to a different baby. That’s all it is, and it is heartbreaking. The portmanteau – feature films comprised of a collection of related shorter films – has long been a showcase for shorts. It has been particularly amenable to the horror genre, from Dead of Night to The ABCs of Death. Salles and Thomas show that powerful shorts are not restricted to any particular genres.

Obviously, this only scratches the surface of a vast field. Had I expanded my parameters to the traditional 30-minute length for shorts, I could have included any number of television films, including at least fifty episodes of “The Twilight Zone,” the greatest collection of original short films I know of. Had I opened it up to pre-1945 movies, I could have been drowning in Chaplin, Keaton, and Arbuckle. So this is a broad intro at best. Please contribute a favorite or two of your own. There are so many short movies out there, just waiting for an audience.