Short film

• 1. Introduction

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  Short films have existed as long as cinema itself, yet most people have never intentionally sat down to watch one. The very first films shown publicly in 1894 ran for less than a minute, projected through Thomas Edison's kinetoscope, a device built for a single viewer at a time. Those earliest flickers were not considered short films at all. They were simply films. The question of what distinguishes a short from everything else would take decades, and several competing institutions, to settle.

  Today the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences draws the line at 40 minutes, including credits. But the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television allows 45 minutes for documentaries and up to 59 minutes for scripted narrative films. The definitions have never fully agreed, and perhaps that is fitting for a format that has always resisted tidy classification.

  What drove short films from the center of popular entertainment to the margins? How did they survive at all? And what does it mean that the format Edison introduced as a solo novelty now reaches global audiences through film festivals, streaming platforms, and viral video? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. The Era of Abundance

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  Thomas Edison's kinetoscope, which debuted publicly in 1894, confined films to a single viewer peering through a peephole. Within years, projection transformed cinema into a communal event, and for the first two decades the program on offer was almost entirely short subjects. Films ran only a minute or two; nothing longer than about ten minutes existed until the 1910s.

  By the 1920s, a ticket bought a varied evening: a feature, a second feature, a short comedy, a cartoon running four to ten minutes, a travelogue, and a newsreel. Producers did not treat this as padding. Virtually all major film production companies maintained dedicated units to develop and produce short subjects. Many companies, especially during the silent era and the very early years of sound, produced mostly or only shorts.

  Comedies drove the format. D. W. Griffith's 1915 feature The Birth of a Nation was a milestone, yet the comedy short was the workhorse of everyday moviegoing. Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp appeared across many outings in short form, and the Our Gang serial ran for years. The adventure serial was another staple: established as a format in 1912, a typical serial ran for 12 to 15 chapters of 15 to 20 minutes each. Every episode ended with the hero or heroine in mortal peril, designed to pull audiences back the following week. Those "chapter plays" remained popular for decades.

  Animated cartoons entered almost entirely through the short-subject door. Walt Disney, Warner Bros., MGM, Paramount, Walter Lantz, Columbia, and Terrytoons all ran cartoon units dedicated to the format, and the animated short would outlast most of its live-action cousins by many years.

• 3. The Great Depression Pivot

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  The year 1938 marked a turning point the industry did not plan for. Through the 1930s, the distribution system had already shifted: where cinema owners once assembled programs themselves, studios began selling packages built around a main feature and a supporting feature, a cartoon, and little else. The double feature squeezed two-reel shorts out of commercial value.

  Hal Roach had discontinued all short-subject production except Our Gang by 1938, and that year he sold even that franchise to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The Vitaphone studio, owned by Warner Bros., shut down its two-reel comedy line in 1938. Educational Pictures did the same, its president Earle W. Hammons having failed in an attempt to enter the feature-film field. Three of the major comedy short producers gone in a single year.

  Columbia Pictures read the moment differently. Rather than retreating, it expanded and launched a second two-reel-comedy unit in 1938. Columbia and RKO Radio Pictures kept making two-reel comedies into the 1950s. Theater managers, meanwhile, preferred the one-reel format, roughly ten minutes, because it fit more easily into a double-feature program.

  Even in contraction, short subjects produced remarkable bodies of work. Robert Benchley had been making short comedies since the dawn of sound, and his various series for Fox, Vitaphone, MGM, and Paramount ran from 1928 to 1944. MGM's Pete Smith Specialties series became a standard added attraction at movie houses from 1935 through 1955. Warner Bros.' Joe McDoakes comedies launched in 1946 and lasted until 1956. The adventure serial also persisted, though by the late years Columbia and Republic Pictures were reusing action footage from older serials and shooting minimal new connecting scenes to keep costs down. Republic quit serials in 1955; Columbia stopped in 1956. Yet a 1964 revival of Columbia's Batman serial set off a media frenzy that led directly to a new Batman television series and a wave of Batman merchandise.

• 4. Television and the Long Retreat

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  Television did not kill the short film gradually. With the rise of TV, most studios canceled their live-action short series in 1956, a single concentrated withdrawal from a medium that had sustained them for decades. Only The Three Stooges continued making two-reel comedies; their last was released in 1959.

  Animated shorts survived longer, and the reasons were structural. Limited animation techniques reduced costs, and the new medium of television gave cartoons a second life through syndication. Warner Bros., one of the most prolific producers of the golden era, went through several reorganizations in the 1960s before finally leaving the short film business in 1969. By that point, its shorts had already been running in televised reruns for years. MGM continued the Tom and Jerry series through 1967, first with a poorly-received run of Eastern European shorts by Gene Deitch, then a better-received stretch by Warner Bros. alumnus Chuck Jones. Woody Woodpecker lasted until 1972.

  The creative team behind MGM's 1940s and 1950s cartoons broke off to form Hanna-Barbera Productions in 1957, pivoting almost entirely to television. The Pink Panther, which began as a theatrical cartoon short in 1964, became the last regular theatrical cartoon short series; it ended in 1980, having spent its entire existence in the limited-animation era.

  By the 1960s, short films had effectively become what they would remain for the next several decades: a medium for students, independent filmmakers, and specialty work. Festival screenings replaced commercial distribution as the primary path to any audience at all.

• 5. Festivals and the New Gatekeepers

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  The International Short Film Festival Oberhausen in Germany has been running since 1954, making it one of the oldest dedicated short film festivals in the world. The Tampere Film Festival in Finland followed in 1969. Clermont-Ferrand in France has been running since 1979. All three remain considered among the most important short film festivals today.

  Tropfest, which began in Australia in 1993, claims to be the world's largest short film festival and has expanded to Arabia, the United States, and other countries. Commentators often credit Tropfest as at least partially responsible for the uptick in short film popularity internationally over recent decades. Couch Fest Films, part of the Shnit Worldwide Filmfestival, separately claimed the title of the world's largest single-day short film festival.

  In the United States, Shorts International and Magnolia Pictures organize an annual theatrical release of Academy Award-nominated short films in cinemas across the US, UK, Canada, and Mexico each February and March. This gives nominated shorts a rare moment of genuine commercial exhibition, something the format largely lost when studios pulled back in the 1950s.

  ShortsTV became the first television channel dedicated entirely to short films, offering a broadcast home for work that might otherwise reach only festival audiences. Meanwhile, curated platforms including Omeleto, Short of the Week, and Short Films Matter have built online communities around the format, operating alongside general platforms like YouTube and Vimeo, which have attracted large communities of short film artists and viewers.

• 6. Pixar and the Mainstream Return

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  Pixar began screening a short film before each of its feature films during initial theatrical runs in 1995, and has been producing shorts on a permanent basis since 2001. Since Disney acquired Pixar in 2006, Disney has also produced animated shorts, beginning with the Goofy short How to Hook Up Your Home Theater in 2007.

  Disney also produced a series of live-action shorts featuring The Muppets for YouTube as viral videos to promote the 2011 Muppets film. DreamWorks Animation typically produces a short sequel included in special edition video releases of major features, and has added theatrical shorts to a few releases as well. Warner Bros. regularly includes older shorts from its library, grouped thematically, on DVD releases of classic Warner Bros. films, and between 2010 and 2012 released new Looney Tunes shorts before family films in theaters.

  In 2009, the horror short film No Through Road was released and went viral, and is credited with creating the analog horror subgenre. The film spawned three sequels, forming a web series. That trajectory, a single short film sparking a genre and a franchise, would have been unimaginable in the studio era, when shorts were scheduled filler rather than cultural ignition points.

  Some observers draw a parallel between the Lumiere brothers' earliest films, limited to approximately 46 seconds by the physical constraints of film reels, and the ultra-short digital narratives circulating in the mobile age today. The format Edison built for one person at a time has become one of the most widely distributed forms of moving image in history.