• a single-shot micro-film by a Lancaster film student (2023)

During the pandemic lockdown when Lancaster University switched to remote learning for the academic year starting in October 2020, among other problems, we were faced with the challenge of what our new Film Studies students would do during Fresher’s week. The need for social distancing precluded any introductory group events, but in any case, many of our students were scattered around the country and across the world.

My solution was to set the students a creative task they could undertake independently during the week and then share with the rest of the group. The brief I gave them was to shoot a single-shot film lasting up to 50 seconds on their smartphones or digital cameras. The pedagogical premise was that the exercise would invite them to think about the formal and social parallels between new media and early cinema (the marvellous new medium of the Victorian period), since the first films of the 1880s and 1890s were single shot films running for less than a minute. It didn’t require them to possess any advanced technical skills, but it was also an expression of the idea that, more than ever before, early 21st century cinema is a democratic DIY medium and that all of us are already film-makers. For our students, like most people with a smartphone, making and distributing films is an unremarkable daily practice, and as far as I’m concerned ‘cinema’ encompasses both phenomenally expensive industrially produced blockbusters and this sort of amateur documentation of everyday life.

I set them the theme of ‘New beginnings’, because we were asking them to reflect on the historical beginnings of cinema, because they were at the beginning of their degrees and a new phase in their lives, and because we were entering a strange and unprecedented period in history with no certainty about how it would unfold and what the ending would be, or if an ending was even possible (and four years later, as we are learning to live with Covid-19 the question of how this might end remains uncertain).

My colleague Maryam Ghorbankarimi, worked late into the night to edit their films together and uploaded the resulting compilation onto YouTube, and at the end of the week we held a virtual film premiere as those with internet access logged onto Teams and watched the film from wherever in the world they were. I wasn’t expecting anything remarkable (or even that most of them would participate) since the main point of the exercise was to distract the students from the frustrations of confinement, and as far as possible, to give them the sense that they were participating in the social life of the University. We told them that if they didn’t have the means of making a video, they could submit a scenario, a drawing or photographs. However, almost all of them completed the task and the films they created were fascinating – funny, thoughtful, inventive, and often quite melancholy. Although some of the films were extremely minimal – such as a simple static shot of a space – and although some of the students deviated from (or disobeyed) the brief by editing several shots together, when assembled into a sequence they comprise an immensely rich, emotionally rounded description of a moment in history (both personal and global).

• screens everywhere (2023)

The exercise worked so well that we decided to repeat it and, although all our teaching is now fully in-person, we have just held the fourth ‘micro-film festival’ with this year’s new students. Incidentally, if you google ‘micro-film festival’ you find promotional material for a number of short film festivals around the world, but as far as I’m aware, ours was the first and it remains the purest in formal terms. Once again, this year’s new group of students have produced a very affecting and witty body of work that is also a sophisticated reflection on the status of cinema and the history of the medium. The films are full of shots of screens and windows, as if making the cinema and the act of framing itself the subject of their films; they evoke the post-cinematic world discussed by Anne Friedberg, that is saturated with frames and screens of different sizes that express ‘a new logic to framed visuality’ (Friedberg, 2006: 243). As with early cinema, a central subject of their films is mobility and transport technologies (reminding us that cinema itself is a means of transport) and, while it may be accidental, one film of a steam train heading under a bridge might almost be a direct reference to the Lumière film, L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1896) or James Bamforth’s The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899) (see below). 

• short films, 2023 and 1899

This year’s films can be found here, and the films from 2020, 2021, and 2022 are all viewable online. They are a testament to the rich creativity these young people bring to their degrees, reminding us that while we are tasked with teaching them, we can also look forward to learning a great deal from them.

Reference:

• Anne Friedberg (2006). The Virtual Window: from Alberti to Microsoft. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press