6 - Short Films as Aesthetic Freedom

Summary

In the decade of the historical avant-garde (1920–30), when the short film was no longer subject to the strictly physical extension of the celluloid and the technical device of the camera (as was the case with Lumière's and Méliès's shorts), it constituted a whole in itself, independent of other subsequent projects and without being marginalised in the act of exhibition. In its origins, the short film, that is to say the cinema itself, used to be shown as an intermission in a play, or as an accompaniment to another show in the space of an entertainment fair. By contrast the avant-garde short film did not look to be screened as a central part of the show but, on the contrary, did not even include being screened among its main objectives. If we consider the works of filmmakers such as Joris Ivens, Alberto Cavalcanti, Luis Buñuel, Dimitri Kirsanoff, Jean Epstein, René Clair and others, we can notice that what they filmed in the 1920s had a ground that was its very realisation. Later, in the 1930s, the emerging documentary cinema foreclosed that full expression of the avant-garde, which filmed largely short films, for political (European fascist) and institutional (state propaganda) reasons, and thus largely ended short film's autotelism, or apparent aesthetic self-sufficiency.

Throughout the first half of the century of cinema, the short film had other manifestations, although static and well determined: one of its most common destinations was private or state advertising, whose commercial objectives or ideological persuasion made the short film's own short duration adequate, as happened in the United States with the Ford Motor Company's factual shorts, or in Argentina with the series of newsreels Sucesos Argentinos, which were shown in theatres before the feature films. In industrial production, linked to the economic logic of industrial studies, the short film was absorbed until nonproduction, that is, until its very disappearance as an industrial commodity, by the imposition of the standard duration format of the long films (an average of ninety minutes), sustained in the dynamics of the star system.