Toward a Poetics of the Short Film

Johannes Riis

 Theorizing Practice
 When Short Films Engage
 Implications for Film Theory
 Filmography

The short film is often considered a student film genre.

Although there seems to be some, perhaps increasing,
demand for short films by television in order to sustain
a commercial production, the format is generally seen
as an opportunity to practice and improve narrative
skills without the costs and pains of a long production
period. This close association to the student film poses
particular problems to someone who wants to describe
and explain the principles of short films. The films
exist mostly at festivals, and another implication is that
there might not be that many good short films if the
practitioners are in a learning process.

However, I shall argue that studying short films makes

possible a fruitful relation between theorizing and
practice that is beneficial to both. Furthermore that
studying short films may lead us to new ways of
seeing spectator engagement in general.

Theorizing Practice

More often than not, experts in a given field or at a

given activity cannot verbalize their skills. Problems
and solutions come to the fore of attention and are
recognized without conscious inference of what
constitutes the problem or how one reaches the
solution. As has been argued, the ability to think
without being consciously attentive to inference steps,
to think in holistic patterns, is a central part of human
intelligence.[1] This is less true for novices and
students.

In particular university students are trained to

formulate verbal descriptions, e.g. in the form of rules
of thumb. Since most universities also teach some
practical skills in addition to analytic skills, or have
students who practice on their own, the label `student
film' might offer an advantage and facilitate a feedback
between theory and practice. This sort of practical
theorizing should be possible not only at universities
but film schools in the broadest sense, where students
are invited to reflect on their practice. In Denmark this
is the case also at film workshops, vocational high
schools, high schools, and folk high schools. Testing
hypotheses and assumptions about short films and
films in general by seeing to what degree they actually
aid the production, is not that difficult an enterprise.

Let us hypothesize, for a moment, that a good short

film does not use dialogue. From this hypothesis we
may search for counterexamples and qualifications as
in conventional theorizing, but we may also discover
to what degree this description helps students in their
production. If dialogue is not used, and the films still
suffer, we should look for another parameter-say the
photography or acting-or reject the theory. Of course
this is not a scientific experiment in a strict sense since
it cannot be repeated by others in the same way. Nor
should it be, as creation needs a certain freedom from
rigorous rules. But feedback from practice may
improve the traditional tools in humanistic studies and
make us better at qualifying counter-examples and
refining concepts.

Allow me a personal note from teaching production

classes. Initially I told students that a story should be
constructed on the premise of causality, i.e. that one
event leads to another by being its logical cause,
resulting in rather predictable productions. When
instead I emphasized that for a short film to be
engaging, it had to be ambiguous, that ambiguity was
an important property of good short films, this led to
productions that aroused the spectator's curiosity but
which sometimes tended to be obscure. Subsequently,
I encouraged a combination of ambiguity - enough to
make us curious as to what was going on - and a
subject matter depicting characters with serious
problems. The ambiguity insured that the material was
not felt to be a cliché, while our concern for the
characters in trouble won over the story's lack of
causal logic.

These "findings" are indeed crude. Considering my

students' and my own inexperience in constructing
short films, the findings of professional filmmakers
and scriptwriters should be of greater interest. Also my
findings are less true of a comedy, or a longer short
film of, say, 30 minutes. Nevertheless I think my
experience with the teaching of short films can be seen
as a suitable case for theorizing. One might object that
learning from practice is a banal and common way of
gaining knowledge, carried out everywhere and thus
not the method to be used in academia. But even so,
the process of generalizing and qualifying is far from
banal. Theorizing on the basis of practical experience
is legitimately carried out in academic institutions
since it requires a certain level of abstraction.
Assertions as to how certain devices and elements
function should have some general import and be
related to questions of history, genre, aesthetics. When
generalizing and qualifying, one must take care not to
overlook counter-examples or explain away exceptions
in a manner that, applied the same way, would
dispense also with cases that are claimed to support the
theory.

If in need of a label, this sort of theorizing practice can

be termed poetics. An alternative to interpretation
where a film is seen to mean something by finding
symbols, allegories, etc., David Bordwell defines
poetics as "a kind of middle-level theorizing-an
attempt to describe or explain particular craft
practices."[2] Especially a "poetician" should ask:

First, how are particular films put together? Call this

the problem of films' composition. Second,
what effects and functions do particular films have? If
criticism can be said to produce knowledge in anything
like the sense applicable to the natural and social
sciences, these two questions might be the most
reasonable points of departure.[3]
Bordwell suggests that if gaining knowledge about the
constructional principles of film is to be compared to
the way natural and social sciences gain knowledge,
these might be the two basic questions. When looking
for an underlying logic of craft, Bordwell points out in
"Prospects for a Poetics," we should be inclined to use
the problem/solution approach. For instance, the
problem that my short film students faced was one of
avoiding predictability, the solution to which was low
communicativeness in the narration.

The problem/solution model, however, is not only of

use when analyzing practical work. It can also be
applied to narrative and stylistic problems within a
certain type of situation. From a purely analytic point
of view Noël Carroll has discussed the structure of the
horror film, using such terms as discovery
plot and complex discovery plot to describe amongst
other things how a horror film slowly introduces the
existence of supernatural beings. The existence of
vampires and zombies has to be confirmed, before
fought as such.[4] Carroll's bottom-up sort of
theorizing on the compositional issue is an exemplary,
albeit seldom acknowledged instance of middle-level
theorizing on composition.[5]

The problem/solution approach is nevertheless

particularly suited for feedback from practice. What is
important, however, is to understand verbalizations on
practical knowledge within a certain framework. The
reflections on historical and stylistic variations that are
part of scholarly film studies are usually not of any
concern to the practitioner who tends to become
normative with the acquisition of skills. In this respect
it is significant that a prime instance of the
problem/solution approach, the first edition of The
Technique of Film Editing, was written by Karel Reisz
in 1953 when he was still a film critic.[6] Here it is
emphasized that an editor's problems and solutions
differ depending on the kind of film or scene, e.g.
action, dialogue, comedy, montage, educational films,
etc., even if some principles, such as smoothness,
apply universally. Another instance is the French
auteur critics; as Barry Salt has pointed out, the
originality in the writings of Truffaut and others stem
in great part from their seeing films for guidance on
how to handle the camera, when to cut, etc., because
they themselves were about to direct their first
films.[7]

Nevertheless, reaching practical solutions and reaching

descriptive solutions are quite different activities. If
one compares Noël Carroll's work on the horror film
with the reflections by best selling author Stephen
King,[8] it becomes apparent that Carroll has a better
understanding of the essentials of the genre. This only
makes sense if we acknowledge that experts cannot
fully explain what they are doing. Short-term memory
is limited and experts attend to the problem and
solution at hand, not the tacit knowledge in between.
This is undoubtedly true for Carroll's descriptive and
explanatory activity as well as for King's creative
process; both require years of practice.

When Short Films Engage to the top of the page

If the first thing we can learn from the short film is

related to practical and "experiential" knowledge, the
second concerns the spectator. What engages the
spectator, and what are the different ways of engaging
him or her. This second question touches upon issues
that are traditionally dealt with under the headings of
identification or narration, but I shall argue that we
advantageously can see them in a new and more
general perspective. A spectator is engaged when
something claims and holds his or her attention and
even more so if the film invokes empathy toward
characters.

Here we should recall that film theorists have always

studied professionally produced feature films. A lot of
craft practices and functional principles have been
invisible to film theorists because they have not
compared amateur shorts to professional films. In this
perspective, the insights gained from studying the
transformation from primitive cinema to so-called
Classical Hollywood Cinema or Continuity Film are
pivotal.[9] In these studies the logic of craft, the
solutions to problems, become visible and are often
very accurately described. However, the potential
pitfalls when handling this "new" material, for instance
seeing the inventiveness of early filmmakers as
ideologically repressive in odd ways,[10] should
caution us against some established interpretative
doctrines. If we accept the goal of the films as being to
engage, the lack of success in engaging a spectator can
hardly be seen as liberating (or "heterogeneous," if you
prefer) in itself, neither in early films nor student
films.

There is more than one way of engaging the spectator;

we do not have to valorize a certain paradigm of film
production. The one used by the avant-garde film, is to
bring experimentation and novelty to the forefront.
The goal of films within this tradition can hardly be
described as one of wanting to be boring.
Experimentation and novelty are engaging in
themselves, but if you don't have a clue as to what they
are new and experimenting in relation to, they will
often appear boring. Thus we might explain the
intuitively sensed difference between avant-garde and
narrative films along the lines of engaging spectators.
As James Peterson has described, avant-garde films
require a certain sensibility and knowledge.[11] We
should not, as he further argues, necessarily accept the
military metaphor of the avant-garde, literally meaning
a group sent in advance to weaken the enemy for those
who follow. The practice of at least the American
avant-garde is one of refinement and revision, not
aesthetic revolution.[12] Filmmakers, when thinking
of themselves as rebells in this tradition, often returned
to one of the two other basic options within the avant-
garde film tradition.[13]

As for their general power to engage a viewer, novelty

and experimentation will only engage the viewer for a
limited period of time. The strongest way to engage a
spectator is by appealing to our general concern for
other people, whether in a general form as in interest
or curiosity, or in the form of such empathic emotions
as compassion, sympathy, and admiration.[14] A
particularly strong situation, fast working and
intensely engaging, is that of victimization. Consider
the short film EAU DE LA VIE about a woman's visit
to a decadent restaurant. Here it turns out that the
entertainment consists of the slow drowning of a boy
in an aquarium. We feel sorry for the boy, although we
are told that he can only look forward to a miserable
life and supposedly feel lucky to be chosen, much like
a Roman gladiator. When the drowning is to be carried
out, we see how more and more water is let into the
aquarium, how he struggles to use the last oxygen
before having to let water into his lungs. We hope that
the protagonist of the story will intervene and are
relieved when she does.

The emotions of interest and curiosity are a large part

of spectatorship in general, and in particular of short
films. Consider the 360 degree, slow pan in WIND
which arouses our curiosity. Initially we see three
women with a rather grave look, and then the camera
slowly pans 360 degrees, first to reveal a deserted
landscape, then a silhouette of a tree without leaves,
before showing the execution by hanging of a group of
men, only to return to the three women at the same,
slow speed. The women turn around and walk to their
houses in the background, quite possibly having
witnessed the killing of their husbands and sons,
perhaps as part of a civil war or occupation (the
costumes suggest the middle of this century).

Our initial curiosity is replaced by an empathic

emotion, i.e. compassion, as we discover what has
happened. This film gains its emotional effect by our
cognitive reframing of the women's expression: the
initial graveness was not incidental but actually an
indication of deep sorrow and personal catastrophe,
their immobility a result of seeing action as futile, and
the lack of tears suggests acceptance of the injustices
of life. Since the landscape initially claims a large part
of our attention, we might even infer that incidents like
this occurred frequently and accompanied living on the
deserted countryside some years ago. Although the
story primarily affects us by the inclusion of
victimization, it is also significant that we have to
perform the reframing. Reframing as we may know
from having had to reframe earlier assumptions in our
life, e.g. childhood events, causes disturbance which is
attention-demanding for the same reason that a
surprise is: a new interpretation of one's relation to the
environment is called for.

This film is called experimental in the printed festival

program of Festival of Festivals, Aarhus 1997. This is
quite possibly because the 360 degree pan suggests a
formal system, independent of the narrative; in
contrast to SUNDAY (Lawlor, Ireland, 1988) which
was termed fiction (here the camera pans over people
sitting around a table, i.e. a typical narrative
motivation). Nevertheless the pan in WIND works
narratively by creating suspense and invoking a mood.
The slow pan from a glance to the objects seen (as the
pan progresses we expect to find out what they are
looking at) builds suspense by delaying the moment
when we find out what they are seeing. A mood is
invoked in the viewer by showing the desolate
landscape, giving resonance to the women's sense of
emptiness which is one aspect of loss. Probably also in
real life, aspects of loss are felt in a spatial, analogue
manner.[15] The only sound heard in WIND, the one
that gives the film its title, has an expressive function
as well by drawing our attention to that wind that
sounds as if it is penetrating something, thus giving the
setting a cold quality.

Interest seems to work optimally in combination with

empathic emotions. Compare WIND's narrative pan to
the slow zoom in Michael Snow's WAVELENGTH
(1967) that lasts for forty-five minutes, taking us from
a vast loft to the detail of a photograph on the
wall.[16] Of course it also creates curiosity as to what
the shot will finally reveal, but hardly so much that it
will engage the spectator for forty-five minutes, and
whatever mood is invoked does not contribute to
character emotions since no characters are present.
This is not to say that for instance a connoisseur of
avant-garde film, or even a film historian, will be
unable to regard the film as a whole as interesting or
important, but my guess is that he or she will not be
attentive all the way through.

The engaging of the spectator is not an automatic

process. The filmmaker may opt for the strategy of
formal experimentation, and thus appeal to our
disposition for novelty. This is risky, since our
attention will be drawn towards individuals or agents.
Characters, however, may not in themselves hold
interest longer than the spectator's initial curiosity will
carry, before getting boring or irritatingly mysterious
as when nothing is implied beneath the surface. One
may, as Jim Jarmusch has done in COFFEE AND
CIGARETTES, combine these two strategies: alternate
between showing strangely speaking characters and
suddenly cut to a vertical view down on the checkered
coffee table. We may speak of "curiosity-strategies"
here; EATING OUT is another example.

A generally more powerful strategy is that of invoking

empathy. Empathy in the form of compassion created
by situations of victimization, as discussed above, is a
strategy that is possible in short films. The filmmaker
may choose to present the incident as it is about to
happen, as in EAU DE LA VIE, or he or she may
choose the strategy of reframing, as in WIND, or - to
name another - THE BEACH. Our emotions need not
be identical to those of the characters we feel
compassion for; something often implied in the term
identification. When the boy in EAU DE LA VIE feels
lucky to be chosen to die in front of the restaurant
guests, we feel disgusted; when he is relatively calm in
the aquarium, we feel the tension rising. In this sense
we react as if we were witnesses to, not participants in,
the situation. We have, as Noël Carroll has pointed
out, both an internal and an external understanding of
the situation.[17]

The risky aspect of appealing to compassion is that if it

fails, the result is an irritated spectator. This is perhaps
worse than a bored spectator. The endeavors of many
actors to appear "true" can make sense in this
perspective: if we sense that the character is only
pretending to be crying, when we are supposed to feel
sorry for him or her, we get irritated. The strategy of
victimization through reframing might minimize this
danger. If we get slowly drawn into the film's universe,
the concrete aspects of characters' problems (or
environment as in WIND) are allowed to "fill out"
more than our short-term memory. When the climax
arrives we will be moved to a far greater degree if we
also draw on aspects of long-term memory. In a short
film this may lie minutes away, in a feature film
perhaps an hour. Even if we are not aware of the
details in the beginning, the concretely sensed events
and qualities, we must assume that these influence us -
a feature film often spends half an hour getting us
accustomed to a character before asking us to feel for
instance suspense on his or her behalf.

Endings often seem a curious aspect of the short film.

In the films using the reframing strategy, the film ends
as the full impact of the problem dawns on us, i.e. as
we perform the cognitive act of a reframing. This,
however, is not true of EAU DE LA VIE where the
film ends as the problem is solved, and we feel
relieved. This is closer to most feature films' "closed"
endings. One may wonder what the mechanism of the
films with a curiosity-strategy is since they do not
specifically solve a problem. In COFFEE AND
CIGARETTES, one of the characters simply leaves,
and in EATING OUT, two characters end up sitting at
the counter. These films end, I suspect, when the film
begins to feel boring. Since we never feel that engaged
in the characters in the first place, this "open" ending is
not felt as a strain. Of course there is an aspect of the
"reframing act" at work since the endings resemble the
beginnings, but this is not as fundamental to the ends
as the slow exhaustion of curiosity.

Often when we talk of causally structured narratives, I

suspect, we actually mean empathy-involving. My
point can be illustrated with recourse to the theatre.
When watching a stage play, I have occasionally noted
that the problems of minor characters, due to vivid
performances, can distract the spectator's attention
from the problems of the protagonist. Since a problem,
until resolved, will remain in the spectators attention,
more or less in the foreground, the rest of the play can
easily seem an unnecessary disturbance. As regards
films, these instances, if unintended, will usually be
eliminated in the editing room (although this is not
necessarily the case with student films).

Implications for Film Theory to the top of the page

Narrative theory is focused on the question of telling; I

have discussed short films along lines of engaging. I
think there is an important difference here. From my
limited teaching experience, I have formed the
impression that narrative theory, with its focus on plot
issues (distribution of information, withholding it, etc.)
is of very little help to a student filmmaker. Too much
emphasis on the plot might even impair a short film,
e.g. the thirty-minute long FUSION where a stock
dealer conspires against his wife, causing indifference
toward the characters. One is perhaps better off
parodying the feature film's often complicated plot in
an unbelievably fast and astonishing fashion as in THE
BLOODY OLIVE.

A plot depends on our caring about the characters to

engage us. If a character appeals to our compassion in
too obvious a manner or before we have gotten
accustomed to him or to her, we will get annoyed.
Quite possibly for the same reason that we get irritated
in the everyday world if people quite knowingly
demand our compassion all the time, especially if they
are complete strangers. One cannot overlook the fact
that plot-driven films that successfully arouse our
empathy, often spend half an hour doing so.
Exceptions can perhaps be explained, as those using
generally weak characters, such as children, that call
for empathy almost by reflex, e.g. DRENGEN, DER
GIK BAGLæNS. The use of stars whom we either
know in advance or feel attracted to because of their
personality, may also compensate for a long
exposition.

Thinking along these lines is not new. Tom Gunning

has suggested that we see the early film as a Cinema of
Attractions, to be compared with a roller coaster ride,
not a narrative.[18] It is significant that the films he is
referring to, were short, one- or two-reelers. If this
accounts for curiosity strategies, the films that appeal
to empathy are better explained in the framework set
forth by Ed Tan. When feeling empathy, he stresses,
"the observational stance of the viewer is accompanied
by a virtual action tendency."[19] By action tendency
he means the emotion of wanting a character to be
helped as in compassion, or to be near the character as
in sympathy or admiration. When a film uses empathy
it is strongly felt; almost as if we become physically
engaged. This is probably the effect of realism, a term
we will be less inclined to apply to the strategies of
curiosity.

In another sense we react as if we were present in the

films' universe, reacting to the wind, the tree, the
landscape. This, however, should not lead us to
illusionism, i.e. mistaking the film for reality. It is
better to say that our attention is completely taken up
by certain qualities, or better, affordances of the
environment.[20] Affordance is another word for
action relevance where we perceive objects and
surfaces according to their momentary or general use
for action. A stone can be perceived as a missile, for
instance, and this does not necessarily involve a
reclassification or relabeling for the perceiving subject,
as Gibson contends (p. 134).

In WIND, our attention is drawn to the unpleasant

coldness of the wind and the dead emptiness of the
landscape. This is sensed immediately as well as the
unpleasantness of water entering the boy's lungs in
EAU DE LA VIE. Neither requires that we adopt an
internal perspective, as suggested in recent simulation
theories where we presumably reconstruct the
perceptions of the character.[21] In a general sense we
may speak of simulation since the affordance of water
entering the boy's lungs in EAU DE LA VIE
somehow, of course, is represented in the spectator's
mind, but so is for instance the affordance of the wind
or the tree. We will be less likely, however, to speak of
cognitive identification with a tree or the wind. I
suspect that the reaction toward the tree and that
toward `water entering lungs' function in similar ways,
and that Gibson's concept of affordance can account
for both.

Short films might not require an entirely new

theoretical framework from that of feature film. But it
seems evident to me that some aspects of how the
spectator is engaged are highlighted in a new, and
perhaps more clear way, than has been possible when
working with feature films. And to connect this point
with our initial one: theorizing the short film might
benefit from the fact that not every short film is
produced by experienced professionals. The central
mechanisms and parameters of failure and success in
engaging the viewer become noticeable in short films,
even the less well-produced.

Filmography to the top of the page

Eau de la vie. : 14 min. Baré, Simon. 1993. 13 min.
New Zealand.

The Bloody Olive. Bal, Vincent. 1996. 10 min.

Belgium.

Wind/Szél. Iványi, Marcel. 1996. 6 min. Hungary.

Coffee and Cigarettes. Jarmusch, Jim. 1986. 5 min.

USA.

Sunday. Lawlor, John. 1988. 8 min. Ireland.

Fusion. Rønnow-Klarlund, Anders. 1996. 30 min.

Denmark.

Eating Out. Sletaune, Pål. 1993. 7 min. Norway.

Wavelength. Snow, Michael. 1967. 45 min. USA.

Drengen, der gik baglæns. Vinterberg, Thomas. 1994.

33 min. Denmark.