Short Film Studies - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2010

Intimacy is a defining feature of the short film's mode of address. Both the context in which shorts circulate and the structural limits of the short film form construct a relationship of intimacy between film-maker and audience which echoes that of the art film as defined by Bordwell.

Ken Wardrop takes up the challenge of exploring the naked body of his own mother while sustaining what Edgar Allan Poe defined as the 'unity of effect'. The emotional impact brought about by the mother's final outpouring is the last touch that justifies the aesthetic choices made by the director.

Undressing My Mother contains a series of unsettling formal conflicts, as between the unspeaking (often headless) woman on the screen and the intimate voice-over. Yet the seemingly contradictory elements all help to downplay the potential provocations of the mother's body and convey her sense of loss.

This dramaturgic analysis of Undressing My Mother shows that it is largely by putting the viewer into a position reminiscent of that of a small child that the film manages to open the viewer's eyes wide enough to see beyond the flesh and behold a mother.

Older women are usually not the subjects of film but Ken Wardrop's Undressing My Mother uses a variety of strategies including defamiliarization, voice-over and the separation of sound and image to disrupt the conventional ways of viewing and understanding older women and thus create a cultural space for exploring such subjectivities.

Undressing My Mother raises questions about nakedness, nudity and nation, and the power inherent in mature women's bodies. This essay examines Wardrop's film in the context of other works that celebrate the aging Venus as motherland. It also explores how the film, which is both an act of mourning for his father and an acceptance of his inheritance, represents a coming of age for an Irish film-maker son.

N. B. What follows is merely an outline of the film, indicating its overall structure and making it possible to refer to individual shots by number. No indications are provided here concerning sound. The images are reproduced with the kind permission of Miles Goodall.

The award-winning TV spot Village is a creative example of NGO advertising using condensed visual storytelling. The spot is analysed using rhetorical concepts and communication theory, and potential effects are discussed in relation to contexts, strategy and communication ethics.

The soundtrack of the TV spot Village tells a story of its own. Some of the sounds communicate meaning very close to the visuals, for example by creating an African soundscape. But the soundtrack also supplies narrative elements of its own, which is most remarkable when it adds a happy ending to the sombre message of the spot. This article identifies the sonic, communicative elements of the spot and describes the main narrative functions of the soundtrack.

There is one brief sonic element in the soundtrack of Miles Goodall's Village that, despite its short duration, works to subtly recalibrate the meaning of all that surrounds it: a recorded sound played in reverse. This essay describes how that sound was invested with occult meaning and thus shaped its strategic implementation in Village .

An effective public service announcement has to be more than aesthetically brilliant. It must raise awareness and motivate viewers to action. In a focus group of 50 participants, 27 say Village fails as effective communication. This can be explained by psychological differences in the perception of information.