Contemporary experimental short films

Borrowing from Jairo Ferreira’s writings and style, the essay takes up what was once the experimental exercise in the country and investigates what the past can say about what it means to innovate in the present. The short film was essential for the initiation of the great names of Cinema Novo: Cacá Diegues, Glauber Rocha, Rogério Sganzerla, Paulo César Saraceni - all experimented in the shorter format. Although today it is still true that many of the new filmmakers start making their careers at festivals with short films, amateur filmmaker is not a synonym for experimental filmmaker. The country’s film festivals have institutionalized the term “experimental” as one of the possible genres for making a film. Through the analysis of three national short films made between 2010 and 2017, the essay seeks to investigate what really is the activity of “invention cinema” in Brazil today. Hypotheses about the intersection of short film and experimental film production scenes are presented as both marginal practices for the general public, which is mainly fed by the narrative-industrial logic of mainstream cinema. Among thoughts in the history of the arts, technical reproducibility and the emancipation of cinema, the essay also brings up the debate of art versus industry, or the work of artists and that of moviemakers.

Brazilian cinema; short-film; experimental film; visual arts; film festival