What is a Short Film?

a still from the incredibly endearing short film 'Bao' (yes it's the one that played before Incredibles 2 you don't need to say it again.)

I suppose I should begin this blog - as with all great and respected pieces of academic literature - by defining my terms. 

So what is a Short Film? Typically we tend to distinguish between a short film and a feature film by its duration. The Academy defines a short film as 'an original motion picture that has a running time of 40 minutes or less, including all credits'. Most film festivals tend to say any movie under 30 minutes which might seem confusing but I think the difference feels pretty negligible (you would struggle to call a 35 minute film a feature film). So really it's pretty simple right? 

Well … sort of. 

In fact, many tend to also define a short film by its content; often comparing them to poetry in the world of literature. Rita Dove (I'd be lying if I said I was intellectual enough to know who this was before hand so sorry Rita... but thanks for the lovely quote :D) once famously (?) said that 'Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful'. One might apply this to cinema, and so short film would be 'cinema at its most distilled and most pow...'  Well I probably wouldn't go as far as to say 'most powerful'  if I'm honest but you get the gist. Or do you? I'm not even sure I really get the gist... Starting to wonder if I chose the right quote for this but I suppose it's too late to back out now.

I can't help but think this could've been avoided had Mr Grogan not already bagsied the best quote.

Anyway, I suppose the point I'm trying to make is that short films - due to the restrictions in length - are usually only interested in a single key idea that they then focus on in greater depth. Or in other words, they tend to be more 'distilled' (thanks Rita, knew you'd pull through) than their feature-length counterparts. In many ways this is similar to the relationship between a poem and a novel. A poem may not be able to deal with as many themes as a long novel can, but the theme or two it does chose to focus on can be explored in a way that is often much more succinct, in depth and clear than any one theme in a novel. 

This is why I find it bizarre that we, as a whole, tend to disregard short film when discussing great achievements in cinema. Why is it that we often tend to view it as simply a less good alternative to feature films, when in fact short films are something we should probably be viewing completely separately underneath the larger umbrella of 'Cinema'; akin to how we view poetry and novels as separate entities in the world of literature. After all a short film's length in many ways is its greatest asset, not its biggest weakness. Seriously, you try to make a feature length film about a dumpling coming to life and giving a lonely grandma a second chance at motherhood that's as endearing and effective as 'Bao'! 

Actually... now that you mention it...