Short Film Specificity: Narrative Compression, Unity, Character, and Endings

Abstract

In 1959, Jean-Luc Godard issued a provocative yet ambivalent declaration about the short film and its “essence.” He said it had none. Writing for Cahiers du Cinéma in his capacity as reviewer of the French Festival of Short Films at Tours, and in his typically acerbic and cheeky way, Godard both dismissed the short film and then recuperated it. He first insisted that critics were “wrong to believe in some special function of the short film” and, speaking for his Cahiers colleagues too, he confessed: “none of us has ever believed that on the one hand there was the short film with its principles and aesthetic possibilities, and on the other the feature, with other principles and other aesthetic possibilities.” He quickly qualified his claims, however, with a larger conclusion: “For there is no difference in kind between a short film and a feature, only … in degree. Or rather, there shouldn’t be. But there is.” His reasoning seems to have been that the short film’s brevity prevents it from dealing “in depth” with a subject because, in comparison to the feature-length film, “a short film does not have the time to think.” In other words, he seemed to consider the form’s chief limitation to be its inability to provide access to character subjectivity and depth of knowledge. He therefore concluded that the short film functions as “anti-cinema,” like the “antibody in medicine,” to strengthen the “cinema.”¹