beyond borders: in the kingdom of cinematic freedom. Could the history of cinema have gone differently?
People described by the narrator of Robert Musil’ s novel as gifted with the“ sense of possibility”, providing one with the“ ability to factor in everything that might potentially happen” and“ not favoring something that is over something that is not”, would surely provide an affirmative answer. Throughout the first twenty years of the cinema’ s existence, it was dominated by short forms, presented in sets of cinematic variety that filled the programs of first cinemas designed to fascinate and amaze the audience. It is the short film format that the first generation of American producers was specializing in. Yet, they have lost to their slightly younger rivals – the creators of Hollywood, who have offered the audience a different type of entertainment: a full-length feature film. In a system based on cinema distribution the longer form triumphed over the shorter, perhaps the viewers wanted the film to last at least as long as they have spent on getting to the screening?
Eventually, the cinema has faced the standardization so strong that we consider it completely natural. With few exceptions, regular feature films last from 90 to 120, sometimes 150 minutes. Let’ s imagine entering the bookstore and being suddenly hit by homogeneity of the books’ thickness – they all have from 200 to 300 pages. What’ s more, upon closer examination it turns out that almost all of these books are novels. In our hypothetical bookstore, there is nothing thinner or thicker, there is also nothing besides novels: no poetry, short stories or essays. The imaginary bookstore would have most certainly seemed odd to us. Meanwhile the current film distribution resembles exactly such“ bookstore”, where one can rarely find something different than a full-length feature film or a longer documentary. There is no“ poetry”,“ essay” or“ short story”. What is more, we do not even put much thought into nature of this selectivity.
Generally, massive territories of short film cinema remain beyond our consciousness: feature, documentary, animation and experimental. They appear on television less and less. It is difficult for them to break through the Internet’ s abundance of audiovisual forms. Short film festivals such as Short Waves Festival in Poznań, Cinemaforum in Warsaw or Żubroffka in Białystok have become a unique occasion to come in contact with this cinematic form.
The Short Waves Festival repertoire is, as usual, very rich and gives the opportunity to taste many different short film forms. This year, Poznań Industry Weekend project will allow us to expand our understanding of short storytelling. Better understanding of the form
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