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Cynthia Felando demonstrates the relevance and significance of Jonze’s narrative shorts in his larger filmography. Felando argues that these short films both reflect and enrich our understanding of Jonze’s auteurist preoccupations. The short film is treated as its own genre with important specificities, including several related to storytelling, narrative, character, and genre conventions that differentiate it from the feature-length film. The chapter’s aim is to establish the viability of contextualizing Jonze’s narrative shorts as shorts, and to demonstrate the value of an analytical approach that addresses their continuities with and differences from his feature-length films. Felando considers his narrative shorts in relation to discourses in the emergent area of short form media studies. The primary analytical focus is on Jonze’s fiction shorts, although his other shorts-related titles are cited to demonstrate the persistence of several of his recurring storytelling, character, and thematic strategies.

Chapter 5 looks at Pedro Costa’s commissioned works by discussing numerous video installations created and displayed within the international art gallery circuit. The chapter contextualizes the approximation of the art gallery to cinema, a medium which increasingly overlaps aesthetic and production processes with contemporary artistic practices. As this chapter argues, the analysis of Costa’s video installations offers a further context to the intertwinement between aesthetics, production and consumption observed elsewhere in his filmic output. These works for the ‘white cube’ rely on aesthetic, authorial and production characteristics that bond them to those exclusively produced for the ‘black box’. This chapter provides comparisons between these works and short films directed by Pedro Costa between 2007 and 2012, such as The Rabbit Hunters, Tarrafal (also produced in 2007), O Nosso Homem (Our Man, 2010) and Lamento da Vida Jovem (Sweet Exorcism, 2012).

Chapter Two explores the visual and musical changes in the opera short as it evolved throughout the conversion era primarily by looking at the prolific output of Warner Bros. and its intensified attention to the tenor. Although Warners’ “high-culture” experiment was primarily conducted on sound-on-disc technology, it nevertheless had an enormous impact on how Hollywood envisioned the purpose of both film music and the body on screen. By attending to the gendered representation of the operatic singing body, the chapter argues that the legacy of the castrato influenced the promotion of the tenor at the expense of the soprano. Thanks to the stardom of Metropolitan Opera singer Giovanni Martinelli, “opera” on film was increasingly defined by what the tenor could sing.

Compulsorily broadcast in cinemas and on television, short films constituted the most important form of official propaganda. Chapter 2 provides the first systematic analysis of 106 AERP/ARP filmetes held by the National Archives in Rio, concentrating on production volume, content, aesthetics, and audience. Brazilian Propaganda demonstrates how these films revolutionized the formerly elitist propaganda style by portraying seemingly apolitical everyday topics. It introduces a subcategory for this kind of propaganda (subliminal propaganda) in contrast to other forms (blunt, indirect, and economic propaganda). The chapter identifies the most common film topics, highlighting in particular the themes of nationalism and rapid economic development.

This chapter explores the use of images from local history archives in the co-construction of short individual films with people with dementia. The study on which the chapter is based was carried out with two men and eight women living in a housing-with-care facility in the northern United Kingdom. The chapter finds that archive images quickly took on a central role in the film narratives of several of the participants. In the process, the archive materials themselves were also transformed, memorialising the everyday spaces and places in which the participants had lived. In this study, archive images were often used to elicit memories of people, or places that no longer look the same in the present day. The chapter reveals that such images were often more recognisable to the participants than were contemporary photographs. This corresponds with research into the ‘reminiscence bump’, which suggests that autobiographical memory for the period between about five and thirty years of age remains well preserved in people living with dementia.

This chapter takes a political economy approach to understand Shane Meadows' development as a filmmaker. By focussing on the institutional-industrial contexts of regional production, it is argued that Meadows and his collaborators benefitted from a complex regional filmmaking infrastructure that has its roots in the 1970s film workshop movement and the cultural industries approach to regional development in the 1980s. The chapter explores a number of different production strategies utilised by Meadows, from larger-budget attempts to reach broad and even international audiences, to more innovative low-budget, niche approaches which suggest a workable strategy for the future of regional film. It is noted, however, that these fragile regional media ecologies are dependent on public funding which makes them particularly vulnerable to austerity.

Chapter Three examines the representation of jazz music by three major studios during the conversion era. It argues that Warner Bros., Paramount, and MGM each appropriated jazz in its own way to promote particular qualities of its film style while suggesting that its own sound technologies might be a means of controlling the reception of the music. The chapter focuses particularly on those moments where the voice fails to signify, discussing the relationship between vocal techniques like scatting, groaning, and humming, and jazz images, pictorial fragments that will not assimilate to the narratives of conversion-era jazz shorts and that acknowledge the music’s racial history. How these images appear in the studios’ output exposes their unique commercialization of the music and the differences in how they expected spectators to react to it.

The chapter discusses the manifold influences that the advent of digital technologies has had on science fiction filmmaking. Among them are the unprecedented globalization of science fiction cinema, the emergence of short film as a major visual form in science fiction, the appearance of digital aesthetics, and numerous audience-side practices, such as vidding, fan edits, and the mockbuster. Many of these phenomena not only provide new contexts for the production and circulation of science fiction film, but also force a reassessment of the traditional conceptions of the genre and the ways in which it performs its cultural work.

Et lille land’ - a little land - is a trope of Danish identity which recurs in many of the short informational films about Denmark made from the 1930s to the 1960s. This chapter outlines why the notion of Denmark as a small country has historically been fundamental to the nation’s self-understanding as an imagined community, and how and why it has been employed in informational films made for domestic and foreign consumption. The chapter discusses the role of film in the national imagination, and the importance of medium-specific qualities in that process of imagining: for the purposes of this book, such qualities include the films’ shortness, which impacts on narrative as well as distribution and exhibition. The chapter then discusses recent scholarship on ‘small-nation’ cinema, especially in the Nordic region, and the place of informational filmmaking within the small-nation context. A final chapter section outlines a further body of scholarship on cultural diplomacy, soft power, and nation-branding in the Nordic region as a framework for understanding how images (including informational films) move across borders and re-negotiate auto- and xenostereotypes.

This chapter examines key short films featuring Maghrebi migrant women in France through an analysis of objects such as letters, a play script, food, photographs, and clothing items. It highlights the extent to which such objects are crucial to giving expression to the experiences of Maghrebi women through this particular medium, where meaning must necessarily be communicated in a short period of time. These objects have multi-layered meanings and serve as potential channels for communication and understanding between first-generation women and people who are different from them, most notably because they have not shared the women’s experience of migration and exile and in many cases do not speak the women’s mother tongue. This analysis highlights the ways in which the women negotiate, navigate, and cross various cultural, linguistic, psychological, and spatial boundaries or barriers that exist in their lives. The cultural productions discussed in this chapter include films directed by Fejria Deliba, Ismaël Ferroukhi, Faïza Guène, and Catherine Bernstein.

The chapter presents the network of different audiences for the films discussed in the preceding chapters. It sets out the context of the wider cultural activities of film-watchers -- bookshop and web browsing, DVD buying, going to festivals. It looks in detail at short films and filmmakers, and at the role of videoart. A section on key LGBTQ film festivals in Spain links this more independent cultural production directly to its audiences. Overall it maps the range of images available to the LGBTQ cultural subject as part of audience or community.

This chapter shows Asquith's contribution to the British film industry. In a career lasting from the 1920s to the 1960s, Asquith directed thirty-five feature films and also worked in a variety of capacities on other films: foreign-version direction, screenwriting, and second unit work. He made a number of short films; some were documentary drama films made for the Ministry of Information during the Second World War, others were made for charities such as the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association and St Dunstan's, a centre for the blind. During Asquith's career, the industry went through numerous changes, responding to the challenge of Hollywood, to the example of European cinema and to major events such as the Second World War, constructing a body of films that prompted both despair and enthusiastic endorsement by critics at various times. The twenty or so titles chosen from the thirty-five features that Asquith directed reflect a number of things, not least of which is ease of availability. However, the selection represents a diverse career in which art cinema, middlebrow culture and popular art are reflected, although the films chosen are not intended to indicate any particular ranking in Asquith's career as a whole.

This chapter examines how the short format film contributes to the formation of queer Asian cinema as a category that incorporates the efforts of women filmmakers. It pays attention to how unique qualities of the short film allow women filmmakers to actively engage with each other’s work within and across the region, and how this transnational connection is redefining how we might come to understand the figure of the individual ‘auteur’ of Asian cinema.

This chapter discusses the emergence of Romanian short films onto the world stage. Starting in 2001, Romanian cinema became increasingly visible to critics and audiences in the festival circuit thanks to a previously neglected sub-genre, that of short films. Romanian shorts, mostly fictions presented by newcomers as part of the final phase of their university training or as totally independent projects, were recognized in high-profile competitions in Berlin, Cannes, and Venice, as well as in most European and US festivals showcasing this specific film category. Notable short films include Constantin Popescu's Apartamentul (The Apartment, 2003), which won the Great Prize at the Venice Festival Short Film contest in 2004, the Jury Prize at the Transylvania International Film Festival in 2005, and the Best Screenplay prize at the newly created Danube Delta venue, Anonimul in 2004.

The first case study deals with the ‘mother’ of Egyptian documentary making Ateyyat el Abnoudy, and traces her career as a lawyer, journalist and filmmaker. As a pioneer of politically engaged and socially preoccupied documentary, she has influenced many young female filmmakers. Since the early seventies, her films, both short and feature length, have been celebrated throughout the world at festivals and retrospectives, but remain controversial in Egypt itself. This case study looks in detail at her early short films, Horse of Mud (1971), Sad Song of Touha (1972) and The Sandwich (1975), as well as feature length documentaries Permissible Dreams (1982), Responsible Women (1994) and Days of Democracy (1996). Dealing with the lower classes, women’s issues, education and illiteracy among women, their personal status and their political situation in Egypt, the films reflect a concern with the subaltern woman. The filmmaker’s concern with the subaltern woman stems from an intellectual preoccupation with inequality and a professional insight into the unwillingness of the state to deal with women’s problems.

The introductory chapter opens the book by positioning Shane Meadows in the landscape of contemporary British filmmaking before moving on to provide a brief career overview which emphasises the continuity in certain practices and themes throughout Meadows' development from DIY local filmmaker to BAFTA-winning director. The importance of memory and nostalgia to Meadows' work is also examined in detail, as is his engagement with issues of class representation. The introduction concludes by outlining the content of the chapters to follow.

The chapter establishes the connections between LGBTQ filmmaking and the everyday experience of its audiences in Spain over the past 25 years. It links a discussion of the term ‘queer’, relating both to film and Spain, to the phenomenon of liberalization represented by changes to the Spanish Civil Code in July 2005 on same-sex married couples. It traces the developments of a queer Spanish film culture and of post-identity politics through documentaries, feature films and shorts.