Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication - Volume 5, Issue 1-2, 2015

Attempting to explain, in a short film, a theoretical concept that underlies our the feature film Madame B (Bal & Williams Gamaker, 2014), I discovered that narrativity and description, always in tension, merge into more clarity as the film gets shorter.

For most people in the world of cinema, ‘film’ still means ‘feature-length narrative film’, while so-called ‘shorts’ fill another, neglected, undervalued category. However, there appear to be more short films around than ever before – more opportunities to make and also to show them, thanks particularly to digital technology. This article takes the usual reductive characterizations of short audio-visual work – as being, variously, a training ground for future ‘professionals’, a free space where young people can indulge in anarchy for a little while before growing up, or as a calling card for the film industry – and interrogates them in the context of a rapidly changing and evolving media culture.

This translation and presentation of Émile Vuillermoz’s review of Alain Jef’s 1929 Festival of Short Films provides scholars with an overlooked document relating to the history of the short film (court-métrage) in France. Vuillermoz argues for the virtues of concision as a matter of taste, but also raises questions regarding the aesthetics of material and temporal economy. This text invites consideration on the differences and links between inter-war film practice and culture and the post-war institutionalization of the short film, as well as the importance of concision and compression (as a matter of the storage and communication of information and as an aesthetic value) historically and in the contemporary media context of YouTube, Dailymotion, Vine and other online video aggregators.

The cinematic illusion of movement always requires a number of images. In this regard, the present article poses the question as to how far one can narrow this down, and still consider such a manifestation a meaningful cinematic experience that communicates a concise idea. Demonstrating the impact of a flicker or an electronically alternating sequence of visual impulses that arrest our attention, a thaumatrope or an animated GIF can already generate such significance. Within both the art world and avant-garde cinema, artists have found ways to maximize the ­potential of such a minimalist approach to the moving image. The discussion of what the minimal duration for filmic experience of any cultural significance could be, is approached here from a media-archaeological perspective.

Deleuze’s film-philosophy makes much of the notion of virtual images in Bergson’s Matter and Memory ([1896] 1994), but in doing so he transforms a psycho-meta-physical thesis into a (very) unBergsonian ontological one. In this article, we will offer a corrective by exploring Bergson’s own explanation of the image as an ‘attitude of the body’ – something that projects an actual, corporeal and postural approach, not only to cinema, but also to philosophy. Indeed, just as Renoir famously said that ‘a director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again’, so Bergson wrote that each philosopher only makes one ‘single point’ throughout his or her whole career. And this one point, he then declares, is like a ‘vanishing image’, only one best understood as an attitude of the body. It is an embodied image that underlies an alternative Bergsonian cinema of the actual and the body – one that we will examine through what Bergson’s has to say about ‘attitude’ as well as ‘gesture’ and ‘mime’. We will also look at it through a gestural concept enacted by a film, to be precise, the five remakes that comprise Lars von Trier’s and Jørgen Leth’s The Five Obstructions (Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth, 2003). This will bring us back to the idea of what it is that is being remade, both by directors and philosophers, in Renoir’s ‘one film’ and Bergson’s singular ‘vanishing image’, respectively. Is the ‘one’ being remade an image understood as a representation, or is it a gesture, understood as a bodily movement? It is the latter stance that provides a wholly new and alternative view of Bergson’s philosophy of cinema.

This article analyses the visual rhetoric of Michel Gondry’s Deadweight (1997), a music video for Beck Hansen’s song of the same name, and also considers the song’s relation to Danny Boyle’s film A Life Less Ordinary (1997). Two key structures are identified in the video: antithesis and similarity – which Gondry employs to visually illustrate the title of both Beck’s song and Boyle’s film.

This article argues that the Lumière actuality Démolition d’un mur/Demolition of a Wall reveals the potential for the development of an atemporal cinema in the midst of the development of cinematic temporality. This atemporality holds within it the possibility for breaking the bond between cinema and capitalism.

Tracing the short film as an alternative to the more familiar feature film, Gunning moves from the shorter films of early cinema to the avant-garde films of Peter Kubelka, discussing Maya Deren’s concept of vertical time and Kubelka’s idea of ecstasy. The claim is made that time in short films can be very different from the time in narrative films, not simply briefer.

This article examines what was, for many decades, to a large audience the paradigmatic example of the short film, i.e. the animated short. Focussing on the first two Mickey Mouse shorts (i.e. Plane Crazy and Steamboat Willie (both 1928)), which I understand as highly self-conscious reflections on animation, I explore how animation relies on a set of pleasures, sensations and fascinations that differ profoundly from what mainstream (‘photographic’) feature-length cinema has on offer, and thereby opens to a series of insights into ‘cinematic experiences’ that cannot be grasped within the logic of the voyeuristic model of the cinematic apparatus that has until recently dominated classical film theory.

Over the years, the Let’s Play (LP) video phenomenon has gathered an audience of millions on video platforms like YouTube. Unlike machinima, the video form which also uses play performances in digital games as its mode of production, the aim with LP videos is not to create stories. LPs simply show captured gameplay sessions, the primary entertainment coming from the added, often humorous commentary by the player through audio or a picture-in-picture frame showing the player in action. This article draws connections with work on early film to explore the particular experience LP videos offers its viewers. These connections include modes of engagement associated with the cinema of attraction, but the focus is on how some early films presented characters onscreen – diegetic stand-ins which put something on display for the spectator. It is argued that LP creators have a similar, though more play-oriented function. Through ludic immersion, LP videos offer non-ludic engagement for its viewers: an experience of vicarious play.

This article considers the ending of the short Canadian animation, Ryan (2004) by Chris Landreth. It addresses the role of continuity editing in vector graphics to argue that the film exhibits, despite its fantastic surface, a paradoxical form of realism.

This article examines the trend of looping videos online. It distinguishes between different types of loops (photography-based and video loops) and their functions (background and foreground). It also argues that the loop through its unit multiplication serves the human need for duration, self-reference and communication.

This brief article presents the everyday cultural use of the Snapchat instant messaging application for video chats as an exemplary case of the challenges confronting studies of cinematics in an epoch marked by the rise in network societies of ubiquitous mobile and social media and technics. It proffers and begins to detail the argument that snap video chats cannot be denigrated as mere ‘shorts’ but must be approached as spatiotemporally and experientially complex.

This short article reflects on short videos of action cam footage that are widely disseminated on online platforms. These first-person perspective shorts are compared to early cinema’s phantom rides in the use of point-of-view shots, and a dizzying effect of heightened mobility and versatility in camera movements. ‘Short’ in form and duration, highly individual and personal, and with minimal (DIY) editing, these moving-image, navigational ‘selfies’ are exemplary for the aesthetics of social media and online video sharing platforms. Considering the distinction Michel de Certeau’s has made between (abstract) maps and (personalized) tours, I explore the way in which these images construct a form of moving-image cartography – a first-person cartography that fits today’s pervasive visual trope of navigation.

Demoscene is a computer subculture that proliferated throughout the 1980s and 1990s. This article examines one aspect of the Demoscene culture, the production of the ‘Demo’, a computer animation generated and performed in real-time visualization through digital code. I analyse the Demo as a technological and aesthetic form, speculating on its possibilities for theorizing a unique mode of digital image experience.