Short films — say, 40 minutes maximum, tops — remain one of the great blind spots of most American audiences. After all, shorts don’t fit into the format of movies (80- or 90-minute features and up) or television (30-minute multiples on PBS, 20-some minutes elsewhere to allow for the paid filler). You can see animation and short-film festivals in larger cities or the art cinemas in smaller ones, but you’ve got to know what you’re going to spend ten bucks on or you won’t spend it, eh?
Aside: Yes, of course Pixar does wonderful short animations, and packages many of them to be released with feature-length films in theaters and/or on DVD. I’m just saying that in general, short films — those by film-school students aside — don’t have much of a noticeable profile here.
So our understanding here of what to expect from short films is shaped by what’s delivered in cartoons, or in fill-in-the-gap documentaries like those on Turner Classic Movies — keeping the audience in their seats until the next feature rolls around at the top of the hour. It’s as though short stories had very few outlets (well, okay, that’s not much of a stretch) — and for the outlets which existed, all stories had to be exact multiples of 3,000 words in length.
Naturally, since American audiences won’t ask for something they scarcely know exists, media outlets don’t provide it, so audiences remain ignorant, and then those audiences won’t… and so on. Less a vicious cycle, than a pernicious one.
Elsewhere, short-film traditions (like other kinds) have evolved differently. Which kinda makes sense, from a story-teller’s perspective: you tell the story completely, and when it’s done you stop, hmm?
