The status one ascribes the form of the short film depends largely on the context within which it was made and then presented. Within an industry context, budding movie makers or aspiring auteurs use the form as a kind of calling card; to demonstrate their skills and to hint at what they could do if only they were given the opportunity to make a “proper” film, i.e. a feature film. In the context of avant-garde or experimental film, the short film is simply the format, adopted for both practical and ideological reasons. The Oberhausen Short Film Festival, now in its 57th year, attempts to bring together these two, seemingly opposing, practices. To make things interesting, the music video and artists film and video are also thrown into the mix.

Questions of what constitutes a short film, how to present the form, and how to critically apprehend it, were especially apposite this year given the main thematic programme, From the Deep: The Great Experiment 1898 – 1918. This programme of early cinema presented many of the first short films ever made and attempted to situate this output outside the history of cinema, whilst at the same time tentatively suggesting that the material might belong to another history. The temptation then was to ask what was the connection between early cinema and “industrial” cinema, or avant-garde film – as a few people did during the Q&A sessions that followed each programme. The curators, filmmaker Eric de Kuyper and curator and academic Mariann Lewinsky, neatly sidestepped the question each time with the well rehearsed refrain, “early cinema is another continent”. This was too often used as a way of not addressing, other than empirically, early cinema’s relation other types of moving image production. The question of the ontology of early cinema, forced as it was by the films’ proximity to later, experimental, practices, was never going to get a proper airing as long as the curators insisted on its empirical distance.

As well as 10 programmes of early cinema, there were shorter “profiles”, distributors programmes and several competition strands. The profiles this year focused on West Coast experimental filmmaker Fred Worden, Swedish “personal” filmmaker Gunvor Nelson, young Indian filmmaker Amit Dutta, and a special focus on No Wave films. This four-part programme, which included some 20 films – plus the last minute edition of Eric B Mitchell’s Mass Homicide or Car Crash –