The long history of short films

The short film has taken some interesting turns on its route from the Lumières to YouTube’s viewing millions, says Rebecca Davies.

In the beginning, all films were short. The earliest cinema audiences may not have been particularly aware of this as they marvelled at seconds-long scenes of circus performers, exotic cities, scantily clad ladies and people going about their daily business. For them, the novelty and the thrill of witnessing man’s latest technological triumph was paramount. But as the 20th century dawned, films began to get longer.

The very first films were presented to the public in 1894 through Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope, a peepshow-like device for individual viewing. These, and the projected films that succeeded them, were often one-shot “actuality” or “interest” films depicting celebrities, royal processions, travelogues, current affairs and scenes from everyday life. The best-known film from this time is perhaps the Lumière brothers’ Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1895), which supposedly had audiences fleeing in terror as a celluloid locomotive hurtled towards them.

The brevity of these one-shot films suited Victorian modes of presentation. As Bryony Dixon, the BFI national archive’s silent film curator and director of the British Silent Film Festival, explains: “The major outlets for entertainment at that time were music halls and fairgrounds, where programmes were made up of a variety of different acts lasting up to about 20 minutes. Most early films imitated other entertainment media already in existence: magic lantern shows, illustrations, variety acts, tableaux presentations. So short was the norm.”

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But in the early 1900s, improvements in recording and editing technology allowed film-makers to produce longer, multi-shot films. Some of the most memorable longer short films from the pre-features era include Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon (1902) – in which a group of astronomers build an improbable space ship and encounter some acrobatic moon men – and Edwin S Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903), often celebrated as the first Western.

From about 1910 onwards, studio competition and audience demand induced film-makers to make even longer, multi-reel films and the first features were born. While DW Griffith’s controversial Ku Klux epic The Birth of a Nation (1915) has gone down in popular memory as the first feature film, it was in fact preceded by several feature-length multi-reelers from Italy, France, Denmark and the United States, including George Loane Tucker’s equally controversial Traffic in Souls (1913), which dealt with white slavery and prostitution.

Features were regarded as more respectable than shorts. Their length and narrative complexity allowed them to be compared more favourably with theatre and opera than with the base pleasures of the fairground. They could draw in better-paying, middle-class crowds and helped to fund the construction of increasingly lavish “picture palaces” over the next three decades.

While the star attraction of these purpose-built cinemas was undoubtedly the feature film, revue-like programming generally prevailed and shorts continued to be shown alongside news reels and sometimes live acts. This was still the case up to and including the Second World War, when short films took on additional roles as government propaganda.

Dr Richard Farmer, an expert in British wartime cinema-going at University College London, sees the period between 1939 and 1945 as “something of a high-water mark for the short film in Britain”, though not everybody liked them. “While the government was extraordinarily keen to place its messages in British cinemas, cinema managers and patrons were much more ambivalent,” he says.

“Some short films, especially those that showed British servicemen actively fighting the war, proved to be very popular, but there were also concerns that the cinema would gain a reputation as an 'interfering marm’ if it dedicated too much time to short government films and not enough to the [predominantly American] feature films upon which the magic of the pictures rested.”

SHORT-LIVED SUCCESS
This uneasy juxtaposition between the escapism of Hollywood features and the informative (and some might say sanctimonious) nature of many shorts was certainly instrumental in their demise in cinemas throughout the Fifties and Sixties.

Chris Hilton, the former general manager at the Odeon Leicester Square, began working in cinemas in 1966 and recalls the unpopularity of some of these documentary shorts: “In the Sixties, you would still occasionally get short films in the programme, things like the Rank Organisation’s Look at Life series [which depicted scenes of 'Swinging Britain’]. But most of these were pretty boring and the audience used to use them as an excuse to pop to the loo or get some more popcorn.”

Financially motivated changes to cinema programming – cramming several screening sessions into one evening and including more trailers and adverts – also played their part in ousting the short. By the end of the Sixties, short films were all but absent from commercial cinema programmes, although short cartoons continued to be shown at the start of children’s films until the late Eighties.

SHORT CONCEPTS