Abstract

This translation and presentation of Émile Vuillermoz’s review of Alain Jef’s 1929 Festival of Short Films provides scholars with an overlooked document relating to the history of the short film (court-métrage) in France. Vuillermoz argues for the virtues of concision as a matter of taste, but also raises questions regarding the aesthetics of material and temporal economy. This text invites consideration on the differences and links between inter-war film practice and culture and the post-war institutionalization of the short film, as well as the importance of concision and compression (as a matter of the storage and communication of information and as an aesthetic value) historically and in the contemporary media context of YouTube, Dailymotion, Vine and other online video aggregators.