50 TOGETHER: THE HISTORY OF SHORT FILMS

The Treccani encyclopedia adopts a concise, little evoking definition: ‘a short clip, commonly with a duration of less than 15 minutes, made of different genres (documentary, musical, advertising)’. To describe the terms ‘short film’, actually, we prefer the words of lamented French director Jean-Luc Godard, who coined the ‘anti-cinema’ expression, referring to an external entity that almost forces filmmakers to test themselves to prove their skills.

Early films were short, for merely technical reasons: as a confirmation of it, take a look to works by the Lumière brothers, Georges Méliès, and D.W. Griffith. Short duration was also perfect to experiment, for example with documentaries: in 1922 American director Robert J. Flaherty is the author of Nanook of the North, an extraordinarily forward-looking movie that combined reportage with narrative elements, becoming the first docudrama film in history.

Animated films have often been short too. The rise, in the 20th century, of majors such as Walt Disney Productions and Warner Bros. Entertainment endorsed the fame of popular cartoons, that with the advent of televisions made a lot of characters iconic to a worldwide audience. Movie lovers know this very well, if we think – for example – about Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks Animation, able to catch our attention in cinemas or with DVDs.