Short Film Studies - Current Issue

This article presents a conversation with Laura U. Marks, a distinguished scholar of film and new media who launched the Small File Media Festival in 2020. Marks’ message is that large-file streaming is harmful to the planet and that we need to act against its growing yet under-the-radar carbon footprint. The festival’s goal is to demonstrate that movies can be captivating and immersive even if they are not large in file size, and encourages creators to experiment with low-energy technologies and techniques. Given the high stakes, the festival’s organizers hope that small-file media will become increasingly influential as an aesthetic movement.

Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War story ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ was adapted in 1959 as a television episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and in 1962 as Robert Enrico’s French film La Rivière du hibou, which was presented as an episode of The Twilight Zone in turn. Although the common reading of this story aligns it with the author’s other ‘antiwar’ narratives, African American enslavement comes to the fore in both these audio-visual adaptations, but with opposite connotations. Examining their digression in narrative and stylistic directions illustrates the dichotomies of motion-picture aesthetics: low vs. high art, mainstream vs. avant-garde, escapism vs. social critique – and demonstrates the cultural possibility for these contrasting approaches to register concurrently as popular media products.

This article analyses Return to Forms with regard to Levi R. Bryant’s flat ontology, which eliminates any degree of hierarchy between things. Foregrounding the entanglements of different textures, Zachary Epcar’s haptic and sonic experiment echoes Bryant’s object-oriented philosophy and calls for a radical ecological sensibility through assembling the manifold fabrics of everyday life with an unusual tone. In this new materialist outlook, human and non-human, actual and virtual, body and matter coincide.

In the Malaysian short film, Nor from the Second Level, in addition to the use of Soviet montage editing techniques, the juxtaposition between the Malaysian deputy prime minister’s speech and the monologue of Nor, the protagonist, creates a conflicting discourse about the survival of the working class and other marginalized groups during economic turmoil. The juxtaposition of the two voices is aligned with the concept or approach called ‘Two Social Reality’ and was conceptualized by the Malaysian social anthropologist Shamsul Amri Baharuddin, who argued that our overall social reality is defined by the social phenomena that take place within the two social realities: ‘authority-defined’ and ‘everyday-defined’.

The ecological landscape an individual, and by extension a community, inhabits is an influential and integral aspect of their experiences and cultural practices in life. But today, capitalist activity continues to cause major ecological collapse and, consequently, mass migrations. This article examines how the Portuguese short film Flores explores a time of ecological apocalypse in two ways. In the first, personal and collective memory of a land before collapse enables inhabitants to hold onto their homes and, in the second, global capitalist forces combine to create a loose form of ecological ‘recovery’.