I write about silent movies for many reasons. One is the opportunity it gives me to watch, and think about, incredible short films. Some of the world’s finest short comedies were made in the 1920s (you can guess the names behind them); in the 1910s, a crop of remarkable fixed-camera fantasies and dramas mixed old theatrical and new cinematic techniques in intriguing ways.
Go back even further and you’ll see films that are short because they had to be. Those that survive often seem silly, primitive, and very fast, and of course they’re very brief—but whatever their technical limitations, they were state of the art. A 10-minute film, in 1902, wasn’t a ‘short’; it was just a movie. Maybe it was screened with a dozen other movies in a tent somewhere, and maybe it wasn’t considered high art by the standards of stagecraft, but that’s was cinema at the time. And so figures like Georges Méliès, Alice Guy, Segundo de Chomón, Edwin S. Porter and J. Searle Dawley poured feature-worthy energies into films well under 30 minutes’ long. Bold work resulted. Or dreck, but that’s art.
That’s my Silent Volume lead-in to a post not about silent film. This week I was invited to a screening, at TIFF Bell Lightbox, of Packaged Goods, a selection of international short films, music videos and TV spots produced by commercial directors. Programmed by Rae Ann Fera, former editor of Boards Magazine, it begins with a selection of films conceived for the Cíclope International Advertising Craft Festival, and ends with several pieces from Skin Flicks, a music video production house founded by Richard Skinner and John Hassay. Total running time is 70 minutes, covering 24 pieces.
