Ours is an age of attention scarcity. We are so easily distracted that sometimes a Facebook post of more than two paragraphs gets the TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read) treatment. A video has to pique our interest within a few seconds or it gets swiped away. We judge content by the amount of attention we have to expend on it: the more time it will take, the less likely we are to give it a try.
In such a climate, short is good. Unsurprisingly, creative forms previously viewed as having limited commercial viability are ascendant — especially when commercial imperatives now weigh heavily against traditionally bankable “longer” forms. The short story is less unwieldy than the novel, and requires less commitment from the reader. The same principle applies to film: sometimes even the two hours to watch a feature can’t be found, but a short film can fill a 15-minute gap.
If analysing the appreciation of these forms in such pragmatic terms suggests a rather bleak state of affairs in the attention economy, there are also more interesting aesthetic and philosophical considerations that vindicate the short story and the short film.
It’s reductive to limit both of these storytelling modes to the “slice of life” genre, though they are well-suited to the whimsical portrayal of a brief or incomplete episode and to sharing flashes of insight into a character. Short forms can also concentrate the elements one recognises in other genres, from thriller or whodunit to romcom and fantasy. In the case of film, this intensification often yields a more vivid cinematographic experience and lends dialogue greater significance — each shot and each turn of phrase carries greater meaning.
Short films can impress us with a neat conclusion, compressing conventional plot principles to fit Aristotle’s notion of the “well-made tale” with a beginning, a middle and an end. My preference, however, is for those filmmakers who tell us enough to stimulate our curiosity (enough, that is, to make us care) but not enough to gratify our desire for gestalt: shape, pattern, order and closure. They gesture and allude, they imply and they hint, but they never quite explain.
This uncertainty is sustained in a number of the films included in the programme of the 2022 MyFrenchFilmFestival, available for viewing (free of charge in SA) until 14 February. The festival boasts 30 titles in seven quirky categories: “Night Tales”, “A Cinema of Desire”, “Troubled Identities”, “Bold Youth”, “Voyage, Voyage”, “French and Furious” and a “Kids Corner”. Over half the programme comprises short films.
The insecure academic in me was immediately drawn to Erratum, in which an archaeologist named Florence and one of her students discover an engraving that appears to be ancient but uses a profane expression that cannot conceivably date from the Roman empire. This impossibility presents Florence with a professional, epistemological and existential dilemma; she is forced to confront the limits of scientific enquiry and to accept that some things simply can’t be explained.
The end credits of Erratum are interrupted by a coda that jokingly “solves” the mystery. It’s a deliberate anticlimax, but this bathos weakens the film nonetheless. By contrast, in a film such as Malabar there are a series of minor (almost inconsequential) revelations but they accumulate into a fascinating portrait, or rather a snapshot, of three lives intersecting in a banlieue at night. Malabar ends without comment or closure — like the characters themselves, we as viewers are left to make what we will of the encounter.
Two very different films, Horacio and Moon, have elements in common: an estranged parent-child relationship and a troubled protagonist unable to settle into “normal” life after imprisonment. Yet whereas the animated Horacio depicts violence in disturbingly deadpan fashion and ends with the threat of matricide, Moon builds to a moment of reunion and the prospect of a fresh start. Or are we being lured into unconvincing optimism?
Each MyFrenchFilmFestival programme contains a few “classics” along with new and recent films. This year the Oscar-winning 1992 short film Omnibus is celebrated three decades after its release. Omnibus, too, offers a memorable ending through a tragicomic twist that borrows from the French theatrical tradition of absurdism. A man is trapped on a train. What happens next?
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