Short Film Studies - Volume 11, Issue 2, 2021

Director David Wagner says Trade Queen ‘was never intended to be a period film’. However, the suitability of black-and-white 35 mm for the story points to the inflection between markers of analogue and digital registration as one that also codes the boundary between queer and straight experience. This article argues that while Trade Queen is tagged as a film without dialogue, the use of sound design and music in the film is critical to a narrative told aurally as well as visually. Furthermore, it is the use of sound in this film – which ends with vinyl interference – that articulates the tension between analogue and digital, and between heteronormative and queer experience. In punchlines, the synthesized reverb of Ruby Treasure’s score, and in interiors heard from the gated picket fence, we hear as well as see the transitions between public and private selves.

Six years since its release, the main reveal of David Wagner’s Trade Queen is no longer socioculturally sensational given how drag culture has been integrated into mainstream media. The dialogue-less film, nonetheless, artfully delivers a nuanced story of identity, tension between one’s exterior and interior, between what happens in the compartmentalized nine-to-five and after-hours self-states. It raises the question of gender performativity through subtle looks and gestures – how Mr Schmidt and Mr Jonas navigate their complex relationship.

The article investigates the poetic and intertextual narrative structure of Lynne Ramsay’s short documentary film Brigitte. Based in a factory in London, Ramsay’s work carefully captures the well-known photographer Brigitte Lacombe in a narrative set-up, which avoids face-to-face interviews. In this postclassical storytelling structure, black-and-white still photographs and voice-over narration melt into a poetic form that narrates personal and interpersonal histories. The article analyses this very avant-garde symbiosis of images and non-diegetic narration through a close textual analysis, while it also investigates the very form of postclassical short documentary set-ups.

Challenging the view of home as the very opposite of voyage, Giuliana Bruno suggests that houses and films share certain similarities insofar as both could be considered inherently mobile sights/sites of passage. Taking this as a starting point, this article considers the ways in which the vignette and the short film act as a vehicle for the young girl’s ‘domestic travel’ in Lynne Ramsay’s ‘Ma and Da’ from Small Deaths (1996) and Gasman (1998).

This article explores the function of poetic child realism in two of Lynne Ramsay’s short films, Small Deaths (1996) and Gasman (1998). Investigating the role of the orphaned child embedded in Scottish film culture, this article considers the ways in which the intersection of social and familial realities is portrayed through the subjective viewpoints of female children. Through an examination of the films’ aesthetic and narrative elements, alongside a discussion of the role of industrial iconography and spaces, I argue that Lynne Ramsay’s films deviate from and subvert a traditionally masculine and patriarchal representation of working-class Scottish life on-screen.

Short fiction films generally present brief and concise stories focused on a single character or dramatic moment. Following an episodic structure, Lynne Ramsay’s Small Deaths introduces a series of events from a young girl’s life. The film compresses the passing of time from childhood to early adult life into three delimited and crucial moments. Focusing on Lynne Ramsay’s fragmented storytelling, this article discusses the relations of brevity and unity with the segmented narrative of the film, ultimately emphasizing the role of repetition as a unifying factor.

This article examines the 2017 viral short film sensation, Kirsten Lepore’s Hi Stranger, with special attention to the weird, even unsettling, potency that her stop-motion animation manages to wield. Why is it that this admittedly ‘creepy’ short ultimately leaves viewers and commenters ‘strangely comforted’? A rhetorical solution to this question is proposed: Hi Stranger’s creepy-yet-comforting appeal derives from the density with which it incorporates an array of rhetorical devices and affective registers – particularly the ‘rhetoric of sincerity’ indicative of a more general ‘metamodern’ sensibility. The intensified sincere rhetoric at work in Hi Stranger moreover has a decidedly reflexive dimension, for this online crowd-puller draws on many devices and registers popular in amateur online videos too: its offers of low-stake, anonymous intimacy and no-strings gifting; its ASMR and ‘cute’ appeal; and its self-professed care and appreciation for the viewer.

The sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic influenced many aspects of film production, which is especially visible in the example of local cinematographies. In this article, I investigate pandemic influence on depicting homeland, memory and locality in Sámi short films. The primary concern in the pre-2000 Sámi short films was the marginalization of Sámi culture, as well as tradition-modernization oppositions. However, in the productions from 2020, a switch into the discourse about the homeland and coping with pandemic in the far north is visible. In this article, I describe productions from 2020, dividing them into three thematic categories: films about the return to the homeland, films focusing on lockdown isolation and films based on genre conventions (such as comedy or horror), used for creating a discursive approach to pandemic. In the proposed article, I analyse Sámi films from the collection of International Sámi Film Institute, produced in Norway, Sweden or Finland.

This article examines Kenya’s first science fiction film, Pumzi (2009), a 21-minute short. The film has attracted extensive academic commentary. This study discusses the academic response and its ideological focus. Using six related categories that help place films in their historical context – Anthropos, Topos, Chronos, Logos, Techne and Genos – it seeks to widen the appreciation of the film’s contribution to the genre and to highlight the visual achievement of its auteur, Wanuri Kahiu.

This article outlines the theoretical tenets of considering the short film as a format. Taken as a format rather than simply a film of short duration, the conceptual triangle of brevity – format – programme is used as a foundation to reflect on the particular epistemological position of short films in film studies and to address larger questions of canon, circulation and context. Rather than working towards a codification of an essence or specificity of the short film, this article proposes that the technical term ‘format’ is a suitable concept to concretely identify and discuss the factors at play in the production and exhibition of short films.

Developed through a practice-as-research methodology, and informed by queer film theory, this article, which is written by a doctoral supervisor and her Ph.D. filmmaking candidate, examines strategies for filmmakers, especially LGBTQ+, to disrupt traditional academic outputs by creating research that takes place in, with and through short filmmaking. In the context of screen production research, the short film serves as a result of the research; therefore, it must perform the research findings. The article will centre on one of the author’s doctoral work, which the co-author is currently supervising, a new and critically acclaimed queer short film entitled Expulsion. Through an examination of Gaffney’s short film, which centres on a fictional queer state, the authors will reveal a selection of short filmmaking techniques, such as the use of historical retellings, environmental thematic connections, as well as other textual methods, which can be used to challenge the current popular formula for LGBTQ+ characters and narratives, which unfortunately tend towards the neo-liberal and homonormative.