17

The Opportunity for Renewal

Who would have thought that Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee, who began their careers as student filmmakers, would return to the short film mid-career? BMW hired each filmmaker to make a short film about his car that would be shown on its website. The films have been so successful that at least one has been released in select cinemas and the series is available for purchase on DVD. Scorsese had returned earlier to the short form to make the Michael Jackson music video “Bad” for the album ‘Thriller. Spike Lee, on an ongoing basis, makes commercials. Thus, short films continue to be an important ongoing element of the creative careers of both Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee.

They are not alone in this movement between the feature film and the short film. A significant change has been brought about by advertisers, whether for products such as cars or music. They have redefined and broadened the kind of work they sponsor under the umbrella of advertising. In the same way, the nonlinear film in its forms and its approach to character and structure has stretched what is considered the entertainment or commercial feature film. In short, change is occurring in every form, from the commercial to the feature film. If we add the technological shift from film to digital video, we add yet another layer of change.

The question that all this raises for us is this: What changes are viable for the short film, a form that, to date, has been most closely aligned with the short story and the poem?

For the most part, filmmakers, like most people, resist change. Traditional genres and approaches to character, structure, and voice affirm the order of things, i.e., tradition. This is how one imagines choices in a stable, traditional world. But what is one to make of a rapidly changing world, where the growth industry is the change agent—that category of consultant whose main purpose is to help the rest of us manage change? This is the state of things today. Change is everywhere—in globalization and its corollary, interdependence; in the economy; and in personal psychology. The gatekeepers of society, the religious establishment and the political establishment, have rarely faced greater challenges. And the media and the purveyors of goods within the media—the journalists, the videographers, and the filmmakers, are dizzy with the opportunities changes afford them.

In filmmaking particularly, the outcome has been a pronounced search for novelty. In fact, I don’t think it’s an overstatement to characterize that search as a mania for novelty. To connect with the audience, filmmakers seek out a new slant on an old story, an unusual form, or an exaggerated voice in the telling of the tale. Whatever the strategy, novelty is the goal. Without the surprise novelty promises, the fear is that the audience will drift away. Today, feature filmmakers and short filmmakers share a fixation on novelty to engage and sustain their relationship with the audience. This search for novelty affirms the pressure of ongoing changes within our society.

In keeping with a time of change, filmmakers feel they need to reinvent themselves. Turning to the filmmakers I mentioned earlier, Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee, each has established a creative portfolio, principally of feature films. In addition, each has made commercials and MTV videos. But the principle of reinvention has gone even further. Martin Scorcese has reinvented himself as a filmmaker/scholar. He has created four 8-hour documentaries devoted first to American film and more recently to Italian cinema. Spike Lee, on the other hand, has looked to the documentary film to reinvent and reinvigorate himself. First with his documentary, Four Little Girls, and more recently with Get on the Bus, Spike Lee has turned to critical moments in African-American history to expand upon his creative mandate—to be as much an educator as an entertainer in his films.

Other filmmakers shift genres for renewal, still others shift roles—to that of producer, in the case of Jonathan Demme—all in pursuit of the notion of reinvention. No group has sought reinvention more vigorously than actors, a number of whom have successfully turned to directing.

At the same time as filmmakers seek out novelty and reinvent themselves, the lines of separation between different media, as well as different forms— advertising and the feature film, for example—are blurring. At the industrial organization level, film studios are owned by a holding company that embraces television station ownership, publishing, music recording and in one case, electronics; in another, satellite cable stations; and in another, water utilities. This no doubt will shift over time, but in principle, it means that film production, television production, theater production, music production, and book production are in numerous cases owned by the same corporate structure. One can imagine the synergistic as well as monopolistic possibilities.

On another level, however, the changes are more subtle, more migratory, and more interactive. Stage productions have long been influenced by film productions, but today it is not uncommon to see highly theatrical films as often as highly filmic theatrical productions. In television, the hour-long series has often been presented as an unresolved story—in short, a serial. From Dallas to ER to West Wing, the macro-storyline—as well as the story of the week, the micro-story—has altered the look and story shape of the hour-long TV film. More recently, the 30-and 60-second commercial have begun to take on the shape of the serial or ongoing story. Consequently, more character and an incomplete dramatic arc are increasingly forming the shape of the commercial. How many feature films have you seen that look increasingly like an episode (Spiderman, The Mummy)? What we are suggesting is that the shape of the B-movie serial has drifted into television, the commercial, and the feature film.

Following this principle, the music video has influenced commercials and the feature film. The commercial has influenced the action-adventure film, and the TV situation comedy has become a standard in the feature film, both in the action-adventure genre and in the romantic comedy feature film. Even the police story has dipped into the TV sitcom genre. My point here is to note the transmigration of form across genres, across distribution systems. Media presentations have morphed and blurred the lines between media presentation and distribution systems. A lot has changed. This has enormous implications for the short film.

Today, digital video, digital sound, the computer, and the availability of high-level delivery systems have democratized the means of production— the camera, the microphone, the editing system (a computer)—’it’s all digital information. And it ‘doesn’t require high-level skills or knowledge to operate. The implications of this situation for the short film are simply staggering. Anything is possible. You have only to do it.

Of course, this situation has implications for education, or to put it another way, the knowledge industry. The acquisition of knowledge should be and can be shorter in the time it takes and less expensive in cost. This book is part of that knowledge industry, as are the classes the writers of this book teach.

So the technology has changed, the industry structure has changed, reinvention is in the air, and novelty may be our goal. All of the above invites— no, demands—that the maker of short films embraces change and explores the forms that will make his or her short film new and novel to the rest of us.

The Current Situation

In North America, the short film continues to be an apprenticeship form. This means that it is predominantly viewed as a portfolio piece. Although festivals, cable television sales, and increasingly commercially sponsored competitions offer the young short filmmaker the opportunity to recoup some of his or her costs. Purely from an economic viewpoint, the short film is best viewed as an investment in the ‘filmmaker’s professional development. The lack of commercial potential remains the greatest limiter to the horizon for the short film in North America.

There is, however, a phenomenon worth mentioning, which is the move to the production of shorter films. Earlier in this book, we defined the short film by time as less than 30 minutes. By shorter, we mean 10 minutes or less. This too may be a byproduct of economic/financial limitations. On the other hand, its distance from the ultimate goal of many filmmakers, the feature film provides ample opportunity for differentiation. In essence, the shorter film requires a level of compression of character and plot that often strengthens the uniqueness of the premise. Looking at three examples from our own school will make the point.

Jeremy Boxer’s Last Supper is a comic look at a serious life issue—always wanting what you don’t have. In this case, a thirtysomething husband is boring his wife with his insatiable fixation on winning the lottery. Every Thursday they get together with a few other couples for dinner. That’s lottery night, too. She decides to play a cruel trick on him. She gives the waiter a set of lottery numbers and asks that after the draw (10 o’clock) he come in with this set of “winning” numbers. The evening proceeds. At the appointed time he brings in the numbers for the husband. The husband looks—they are his numbers. He has won! He checks with the waiter. Are these truly the numbers? They are. At that point, the husband throws a set of keys on the table and tells his wife, “I’ve been having an affair with your sister for six months. I’m leaving you. You can have the car.” And he leaves. The film ends, with our knowing that this result is not what his wife expected. We are not certain how he will adjust once he discovers the truth about the lottery. But a lie (the lottery numbers) has unmasked the truth (his infidelity).

A second short, Michael Slavens and Matthew E. Goldenberg’s Sob Story (see Appendix A), has an equally realistic intention and as in the case of the previous example, it is the premise that keeps us guessing as to how far the writers are willing to go to see their main character fulfill his goal. Here too, desire, fantasy, and real life mix. The film opens in the apartment of the main character on a first date that isn’t going well. The young woman looks for anything of interest but finds only albums of baseball cards—clearly important to him but a reminder to her of how young he is. Just as the young woman decides to leave, having had enough, the young man receives a call from his mother. His grandmother has died. He feigns a dramatic response and he notes that the young woman is very responsive. In fact, the more upset he becomes, the more committed she is to him. She will take care of him in his moment of trial. As far as he’s concerned, he’s found the key to the relationship: keep brimming with grief. He tells her he will have to speak at the grandmother’s funeral. How will he be able to cope with the responsibility? The young woman’s commitment grows.

To gain expertise at grieving, the young man attends a stranger’s funeral. He notes the words spoken as the man is overwhelmed with tears of grief. He practices at home, trying to bring on his own tears. He’s not succeeding and he’s worried, but he has a plan.

At this grandmother’s funeral, his moment arrives. The young woman sits with his parents. She’s his, if only … He begins his speech. As he speaks, he begins to tear up his prize baseball cards. He is overwhelmed with grief. And he’s a success as a griever and a would-be boyfriend. His goal, to get the girl, is achieved. His singularly selfish action, however, points to his disregard for the moment—his grandmother’s funeral. The irony is punctuated by the loss of material goods (the baseball cards) while the personal loss (his grandmother) remains unregistered.

The third example is Jonathan Liebesman’s Genesis and Catastrophe. The entire film takes place in a maternity ward. The time is the late 19th century; the place, middle Europe. A woman is in the last stage of a difficult labor. With considerable effort, she gives birth with the doctor’s aid. The baby is very small. He may not live out the night. This is not a new experience for her. She has lost more than one baby before. This infant will probably also die. She is despondent. Her husband arrives. He sees the child is too small and decides it will not live. He is older, bursting with authority. Rather than comforting his wife, he slaps her. She has failed again. He leaves. She is determined that the baby will live. She will name him Adolph. The film ends chillingly on this note—the entry into the world of Adolph Hitler.

This film, unlike the others, is atmospheric, brimming with period detail. The paradox of death in life and abuse in a relationship gives the film tremendous power.

In Europe, short films are considered an art form and consequently receive exhibition at festivals and financial support from local, state, and federal cultural organizations. There, the phenomenon of shorter films is equally of interest. For example, the film chosen as the Best European Short of 2002 is only 4 minutes long. We will now look at this film as well.

Gert Embrechts’s Vincent (see Appendix A) is the story of a young boy who is born different.

Because he was born with only one ear, his mother has him constantly wearing a hat. But there is enormous prejudice against people who wear hats. And so Vincent is trying to meet the world—hatted, as it were. Can he survive in a world where people don’t like people who wear hats? This is the question in Vincent.

This fable has a happy ending but it poses the question of difference in society. Can we tolerate people who are different? Notable in Vincent is the Belgian filmmaker’s ambition, and his distance from a realistic approach to the narrative. Metaphor, parable, allegory, in short, a more literary approach to narrative is closer to a poetic approach, as opposed to the more realistic approach found in the North American examples mentioned earlier.

The Importance of the Short Film

The short film is crucial, not simply as a format suitable for portfolio development. It is important for three enduring reasons: its proximity to other arts, its cost, and its enhanced capacity for the voice of the writer and the director. First, we will address the proximity of the short film to the other arts.

Unlike the feature film, in the United States the short film has strong linkages to noncommercial arts—the short story, the poem, the painting, the photograph. Consequently, in both form and content, the short film is adaptive to a broader band of creative goals. The short film can address a moment as the photograph does; a mood, as the poem does; or a deep, reflective observation, as the short story so often has. The form consequently is far freer in its creative parameters than is the long film.

A second and obvious consideration for making the short film is its cost. No “stars” are required, and given the noncommercial nature of the short film, locations and extras can be kept minimal to suit the story and the budget of the filmmaker. Not mentioned, but equally important, is format flexibility—a choice of 16mm, or video in various formats from beta SP to digital to half-inch. All are used for the shorts. Budgetary considerations may dictate the recording format, but improvements in transfers and printing suggest that the exhibition format for the short film is also flexible.

Voice continues to be a critical element. Whether the filmmaker chooses to use a genre that highlights voice (the fable, the satire, the docudrama, the experimental narrative) or a more traditional melodrama or situation comedy where voice is more masked, the more natural fit of the short film to metaphor implies the greater potential of the short film for a stronger sense of voice.

In addition, short films have been the starting point for significant filmmakers. John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy) began with Terminus. Roman Polanski (The Pianist) began with Two Men and a Wardrobe. George Lucas (Star Wars) began with THX1138. Each of these films experiments with form and content, using a powerful voice that ultimately reached large audiences and that thematically links the filmmakers’ later work to those short films.

The Parallels in Documentary

The documentary shares with the short film its noncommercial history. Consequently, each uses a broader band of actual and potential material. In part it also characterizes each as a less expensive and thus more available form of expression. The two forms also share an important goal: the deep desire to say something, to affect their audience. That conviction to affect the audience is enabled by the relationship each form has to voice.

As mentioned earlier, the link of the short film to metaphor and to fable enhances voice. In the case of the documentary, however, it is its unique structure as well as the fact that it looks real that lends gravitas to the enterprise It’s about real people and real events, so the intention of the filmmaker is to portray a real world as opposed to an imagined world. And as a result, the documentary seems more important.

Turning to the structure of the documentary, its difference is almost immediately apparent. The documentary looks like a case upon which its maker has taken a decisive point of view. Think of it as the presentation of a social, political, or economic problem. Implied in the voice of the filmmaker is what he or she thinks is the desired solution. Every sequence makes another point about the problem. The key is to emotionalize that problem through our relationship with a character or characters victimized by it. Few dramatic shorts unfold in this way. Either character is a vehicle for voice (the fable) or the vehicle for our identification (melodrama). We will have something of a journey as we follow the dramatic arc of the narrative. Unlike the documentary, however, the structure is not driven by the need to make a case.

Finally, the documentary, because of its relatively low cost, has been a center of innovation. In style, in sound, in its relentless attachment to “real lives,” the documentary has been far more interested in innovation than its more commercial counterpart. Here too, the parallels between the documentary and the short film are striking.

The Parallels in Experimental Film and Video

The parallels between the short film and the experimental film and video are even more striking. As in the case of the documentary, the experimental film or video offers cost advantages over the dramatic narrative. In addition, the history of experimental film and video has been marked by a willingness to take creative risks—a quality that affiliates these forms with innovation. The experimental film and video forms are, as a result, as much a center for invention as the documentary.

Because experimental film and video put a greater emphasis on form or style than content, one can frame the genre as using style and content in a dialectical fashion or simply to see the form obsessed solely with style. The consequences are as follows:

Do these qualities have their analogue in the short film? To a certain extent, they do. Short films rely on simplicity in characterization and the deployment of plot. They tend to embrace metaphor. And short films also tend to deploy a powerful voice—which leaves us with the degree of style employed in the short film.

Although the experimental film and video embrace style as the central quality of the genre, the short film varies in the degree of that embrace. Although it is true that style is very important in the short film, it needn’t be the exclusive defining characteristic that it is in the experimental genres. Style will be less important should the filmmaker opt for a melodrama, but it will become more important if the filmmaker opts for a fable or a docud-rama or indeed an experimental narrative.

Nevertheless, the parallels between the experimental film and video and the short film remain striking.

The Short Short Film—The Commercial

The obvious characteristic about the commercial is how little time there is to tell a story. Nevertheless, there is character and plot in many 30-, 60-, or 90-second commercials. Several characteristics of these have had considerable influence on the short film. Foremost of these characteristics is that the commercial needs to find a visual solution to character and to plot. In addition, the style must be strong but simple, and it has to observe the economy of the narrative.

Another influence that devolves from commercials is the use of humor. Of course, humor is widely used in every film narrative form but again, the commercial doesn’t have the time to build character and plot. So the humor must be presented in an exaggerated form. A man finds out he has lost his job as his boss on the elevator offers it to an “eager” and “younger” person. All this happens on the trip up to his office.

Another notable characteristic of the short short film is surprise—a toddler wearing the smock and stethoscope of a physician, the use of an animal to comment on human behavior, and so on. Surprise and exaggeration are both qualities of the commercial that have increasingly migrated into the short film.

The Nonlinear Film

Another directional influence on the short film is the nonlinear film. The nonlinear feature film that I refer to takes two forms: the structural nonlinear film, such as Anderson’s Magnolia and Egoyan’s Exotica; or the pseudo nonlinear film, such as Stone’s Natural Born Killers. The latter is in fact a loose narrative that employs the MTV style to shape individual scenes. The latter also has a more clearly linear shape in that there is a resolution of sorts.

The nonlinear film is marked by a number of characteristics. From the point of view of resolution, there is none. The form is totally open-ended. There are multiple main characters but they don’t share a goal or a dilemma. There may or may not be a plot. Because the characters don’t have apparent goals, there is nothing for the plot to work against and so plot in the nonlinear film is background, no more important than dialogue or another information track.

Two characteristics of the nonlinear film particularly commend themselves to the purposes of the short film. The first is the importance of voice to pull the film into a coherent experience. The second is the urgency with which individual scenes need to play out. They need to do so urgently because the usual sources of identification and energ—the main character and the vigorous pursuit of a goal—are absent in the nonlinear film. Consequently, the nonlinear film needs to rely on sharper conflict between characters and greater energy in the dialogue.

It may even be useful to think of the nonlinear film as a series of short films about the individual characters who inhabit the narrative. What pulls the stories together may be the voice of the filmmaker or it may be a dilemma the characters share. (The half-dozen characters of the Sprecher sisters’ 13 Conversations About One Thing, all find themselves living in New York. They share location but differ in their philosophies of living. How fate and the city interplay to challenge those philosophies is the core of each character’s story.)

The Digital Video Movement

The technology advance of digital video offers a new opportunity for makers of the short film. Essentially, the technology will not contribute directly to the writing of a short film, but it will enable the writer-filmmaker to view the writing process as more malleable.

To be specific, the fact that the writer can use digital video—an inexpensive recording format—to work with actors and to try out scenes, implies that such work, whether improvisational or scripted, can enhance the actual script. In other words, the writing process can embrace what may have been a discreet part of the pre-production process—casting, rehearsal—and a more liberal attitude to what will constitute a scene or sequence as it eventually appears in the final form of the short film.

Digital video allows for experimental as well as experiential components that were simply too expensive to imagine in 16mm, for example. In that sense, digital video can alter what the writer considers the writing phase of the production. It also opens the short film to a much larger constituency, again because of the lower expense. This democratization can only benefit the short film as a form as well as broaden its aesthetic parameters. There is little question that the digital video revolution is already changing the nature of short films.

New Directions

Change is all around us. The object of this chapter has been to address the reasons for and influences on the short film in a period of technological and media change. Our goal has been to encourage the filmmaker to embrace that change, and renew this form—the short film. That renewal is the opportunity you face today.