Short Film Studies - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2011

Short films are no longer celluloid but software, and, following Deleuze, the most interesting short films no longer deal in movement but in time. These are not little movies but full-length timies. This article makes the case for a new critical approach to the short film.

Although the title Alumbramiento references childbirth, children are conspicuously absent throughout the film: motherhood defines Maria, but not her children. In framing death by referencing the absence of children, the film also comments on the discontinuous nature of the post-Francoist Spanish family.

A new (post-9/11) emphasis on physical suffering and its transcendence (as opposed to post-World War II psychological suffering and its confounding) is emerging in contemporary European cinema at all levels, from feature-length movies to short films as exemplified by Alumbramiento.

From a gendered perspective, Alumbramiento is a traditional Oedipal scenario. However, in spite of the supposed ahistoricism of its Freudian overtones, they could and should be read as having profoundly social implications. If, on the individual level of one family, the film explores the death of the matriarch and the emotional and practical impact it has on her son and daughter, at the more collective level it extends to the issue of ageing Europe and the question of who is doing the caring. As such the film reinforces the gendered division of caring labour where it is women who carry its burden.

How does a short film such as Alumbramiento relate to a classic genre such as melodrama? This article examines how the film's exploration of morality, its adoption of pathos and its use of soundtrack and mise-en-scène all demand its inscription within an evolving concept of melodrama.

With contrasting lights and shadows reminiscent of Francisco Zurbarán's paintings, Alumbramiento offers a palette of differing acts: 'to give birth', becoming a parent of your own mother, 'to illuminate' the path to a good death. The initial fear subsides and new alliances are born, inviting the viewer to take a stand.

This essay places Alumbramiento in the context of Spanish cinema after 1960. Narrative and formal analysis focus on strategies to make dual metaphors of death and birth converge within the film as a family is brought closer together and renewed during the mother's final hours.

This article will analyse Alumbramiento in the context of the sociology of death, examining whether the ways in which it portrays death and dying reflect recent changes that have taken place in contemporary Spain.

This article focuses on the important role that light plays throughout the film. The title itself, and the film's plot, stress the fact that everything is told in reverse, with oxymoronic elements playing a significant role. This is also the case with a celebrated poem by Vicente Aleixandre, 'Ven siempre ven', among other works, in which the title's imperative sentence is negated by what follows.

Derailment elegantly and playfully promises more than it delivers. No matter: its director deploys the cinema's oft-neglected strengths to explore the state of subway reverie. Ravishingly shot, with symphonically scored natural sound, it makes a woman imagine a love affair, then take the first promising, outrageous steps in pursuit.

This article examines resonances in popular culture of the location where Derailment is shot. It situates the use of close-ups within surrealist and other aesthetics. It asks how we reread the text in the knowledge of recent terrorist atrocities. By comparing Derailment with other short films, it also queries the sexuality of the glance.

This essay explores the ways in which Derailment evokes - primarily in light and sound - the air of the Paris Métro: the distinctive scent of the subway system, the movement of air through tunnels, platforms and carriages, and the sharing of that air with others who move through the space.

This article will concentrate on the problem of the film's distribution of so-called epistemic competence. It will analyse the film's carefully mounted spaces of undecidability where focalization, authorial/personal narration and (enounced) enunciation as a whole are concerned.

This essay explores the political and religious conflicts embedded in the film. In particular, I focus on how British, American and Irish Protestant (Swiftian) influences assault the traditional Irish Catholic ethos. I argue that the allusion to Swift suggests that neither modernity nor tradition encapsulates the desired state of being.

Sunday presents us with a moment of character revelation that undermines the gender stereotypes that have dominated Irish cinema. Its force lies in its refusal to contextualize this revelation through narrative, thereby ensuring that it retains its power to disturb.

Using Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, this article examines the gendered dynamics of the various levels of signification in Sunday. It considers the way in which the mother's desire acts as an uncanny disruptive device on traditional structures of meaning and order.

Drawing on the theory of 'de-familiarization', this essay expands on its former applications to literature and the visual arts (specifically cubism) in order to extend it to a reading of John Lawlor's cinematic text, examining how one brief question, 'Mum … Have you ever had an orgasm?' shatters the long-established cliché of the provincial Sunday dinner characterized by vacuity and an absence of action.

This article explores how Sunday weaves together - through patterns of imagery, sound and silence - forms of catastrophic revelation concerning patriarchal obsession with control that manifests itself through institutional Christianity, enlightenment dreams of cosmic domination or, most shockingly and viscerally, in the private space of the family dining room.

Sunday juxtaposes curiosity, religion and desire amidst the clash of acute sounds vying for attention. These sounds - the banality of knives and forks scraping plates, the instruction of a sermon being delivered via the radio, and a horse's breath and steps - set and break the boundaries between the aforementioned thematics.

A gendered distinction between straight lines and circles offers a way of approaching the aesthetic choices that underpin Sunday. The situation of the crucial close-up in an alternative temporal and spatial register highlights the film's implicit tension between a 'feminized' space and a 'masculine' regime of narrative law and order.

I explore here the significance of the references to the foreign media in Sunday. My focus is on the sequence featuring the radio broadcast and the references to The Sunday Times and The Sunday Press. How do the father's tastes add to our understanding of his character and motivations?