Storytelling and Style: The Art Short

Abstract

Perhaps the most profound virtue of the art short is its enormous diversity. Since its emergence in the 1950s, the art short has demonstrated a greater range of storytelling and aesthetic strategies than the classical short and, arguably, the feature-length art film. The focus in this chapter is upon the short film’s conspicuous divergence during the 1950s from the more conventional plot-driven narratives, studio-bound settings, and conservative formal strategies associated with the studio era’s classical short, in favor of more character-oriented, looser, episodic, and ambiguous narratives that use an array of visual strategies, from naturalistic to surreal. The early development of the art short took place in the context of the period when the filmmakers associated with the influential European “New Waves” used techniques meant to counter classical Hollywood’s narrative mode. As this chapter aims to demonstrate, shorts were the advance guard in the revolution. Following a brief consideration of a noteworthy precursor to the modern art short from 1933, Zero for Conduct/Zéro de Conduit (Vigo), the discussion will include attention to several landmark titles from the 1950s and thereafter, which help to illustrate the form’s wide-ranging storytelling and formal strategies, and also convey the historical, critical, and aesthetic significance of individual films. Not surprisingly, the art short can be distinguished from the feature-length art film based on its characteristic attention to carefully focused, though often highly ambiguous, narratives and to unity.