A Certain Tendency of American Festival Short Films

I volunteered over the weekend for the 20th annual Boulder International Film Festival. As a result, I was only able to take in three programs as a viewer, including one at which I was also providing video documentation of the surrounding event. One of those was a documentary called The Arc of Oblivion (Ian Cheney, 2023); the other two were programs of short films.

On Friday evening, I watched the festival's Teen Film Competition with my son; it was this event for which I also provided videography. The program consisted of short films across several categories: Comedy, Documentary, Drama, Thriller, Experimental and Animation. If the categories seem like they could overlap somewhat, it's understandable, since the purpose of the event was to showcase a quantity of films that would offer a broader opportunity to a larger group of young people than might be included in a conventional shorts program.

And indeed, Friday's program included three films in each category, for a total of 18 short films. The Shorts 2 program, which I attended with my wife on Sunday at the Boulder Theater, showed only five films. Those five were longer than most of the teen films, and the screening included two Q&A segments, so both programs came in at approximately 90 minutes. It is notable that four of the five films in Shorts 2 were shortlisted for the Academy Awards this year; none of them made the cut.

I mention the quantity of films at the Teen Showcase with more than a touch of irony. We know, of course, what quantity is often contrasted with—and it was quality I was thinking about when I woke up this morning. Specifically, I remembered François Truffaut's sarcastic mockery of "the Tradition of Quality" in French films of the 1940s and early fifties in his seminal essay for Cahiers du Cinéma, "A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema." In this essay, Truffaut makes his initial argument for what came to be called "auteur theory," and the piece is generally considered the intellectual gauntlet-throwing of the French New Wave.

It was helpful to think of Truffaut as I considered just what irritated me about most of the short films in the Shorts 2 program—all made by "professional" filmmakers—as opposed to the work created by the kids honored in the Teen Showcase, "amateurs" all.

Why does anyone make short films? Two answers seem to me the most important. One, people make a short film to act as "calling card" for their talents, in the hope that they will be allowed to make a feature film based on the strength of their short. And two, people make short films because they lack the resources to make a feature film (they suppose), and feel compelled to make a film. Into the second category fall most student films—a person is interested in filmmaking, enough to attend a class or even a film school, and they are required to make short films as part of the curriculum.

Shorts are in this sense invaluable learning tools, and a kind of rite of passage for filmmakers. Other than film festivals, there is essentially no market for shorts, is the prevailing wisdom. Yes, a few of them might enter collections to play on public television or the internet, but that's not thought of so much as a market as the best possible outcome to find a small audience, although there is little to no compensation. (Little attention is given in this context to the explosion of short work on sites like YouTube.)

I would hazard a guess that most film directors and producers actually never make a short film before making a feature; but a significant number do go that route. And what kind of short film do they make?

Judging by the Shorts 2 program—and every short film program I have ever seen, and most of the shorts I have seen individually—they make a vastly overpriced, overproduced, overlong pastiche of feature film aesthetics calculated to be familiar and stir shallow political or emotional identification among an often gray-haired crowd that seeks comfort, rather than anything resembling living art.

So you get a wildly expensive Wes Anderson pastiche, stretched five times longer than it should have been for no reason other than that money was available and the Oscars like longer short films with "high production value," even though the length exhausts the concept. And you get self-important real-world political drama in miniature, but not so miniature that the filmmakers don't knock you over the head with their context and timeliness five or six times too many—the Oscars like social relevance. Or, perhaps, another topical "issue" story based on real life, that nevertheless abandons much of what actually happened in real life to pump excess drama and sentiment into a situation to the point it loses most of its authenticity. But, look! the producers must have worked hard because they filmed in a difficult location, say LAX, which automatically makes it authentic, right?

Or, worst of all, they make a nearly unendurably long, cliche-ridden "inside baseball" show business "satire" about the stupidity and crassness of studio notes ruining a fledging auteur's Important Film. The film as shown, of course, is terrible to begin with, utter garbage, so it should have received devastating notes—resulting in an insufferably smug, largely unfunny reel assembled to show off the producer or director's access to the Warner Bros. backlot.

This it the Tradition of Quality writ small and cynical, for people who have little interest in the film they are actually making, but hope to win an award so they get to make a terrible feature film.

(You may have noticed that I gave four somewhat vague examples. That's because the fifth film was a French-Canadian comedy that was appropriately scaled as a short film, self-contained and actually funny, made by a real filmmaker who understood the aesthetic possibilities of the form and wasn't just trying to score a more prestigious gig. It is very worth noting how the robust public film funding program in Canada continues to give us great work after many decades, work that is largely unencumbered by commercial considerations.)

I haven't named names here, and kept the descriptions vague, because I am acutely aware of how difficult it is to make any film, and I generally have a great deal of sympathy for filmmakers and all the artists in general who do this demanding work. But it's very disappointing to see such compromised work celebrated, when it would have been better for the money to have been spent in almost any other way. Perhaps some of the filmmakers involved will make better films in the future.

As for the kids at the teen showcase, I know they will. Their films pulsed with the joy and excitement of artistic discovery, having not yet been castrated by the Tradition of Quality misbegotten commercial calculations. In fact, the work seen there gives me a great deal of hope for (and pride in) this generation of young people, who, having cut their teeth on YouTube, have a far more sophisticated sense of filmmaking than, perhaps, any generation since the film school brats of the 1970s.

This is clear in their fearless experimentalism, their crackerjack comic editing, their sense of place and complex emotion, their sense of fun and satire. There was a silent film parody, an immigrant/workplace comedy, layered documentaries about failed ambition and resilience after devastating injury. A notable drama about academic burnout and parental pressure, followed by ambitious thrillers that—if they didn't entirely work—reflected serious cinematic problem-solving and complex storytelling. Experimental work full of imagination, visual invention, and legible emotion, followed by delightful straight-to-the-heart animation.

One of my favorites was a conceptually brilliant mock documentary about the statistically most "average" student at the school. This was not the only film to make use of technical tropes straight from online video to hilarious effect; the YouTube generation is almost singlehandedly tearing down and rebuilding moving image art while the grownups are chasing boring awards and tired cliches. Another film I loved was a moving personal essay about connection to his ancestral land by a Diné (Navajo) boy, beautifully filmed on the Navajo Nation, effortlessly recontextualizing Tsé Biiʼ Ndzisgaii ("Monument Valley"), the home of the most famous of John Ford's Westerns.

The news out of Hollywood is dire, as it has been, like clockwork, every five to ten years for the past century. Maybe it's even worse now—competition from online video, streaming, social media, lengthy strikes, artificial intelligence—but I'm not worried. The kids are all right and, if they just keep doing their thing, the future of the medium looks bright.