Alissa Wilkinson in Vox:
The short film is a neglected form of American entertainment, prevalent — you can find them most anywhere, and pretty much every filmmaker has made a few — and yet barely watched or talked about. That’s strange, when you think about it. We talk about movies (by which we mean features), and we talk about TV. Paramount recently uploaded all of Mean Girls to TikTok, in 23 separate clips, and the platform’s subscriptions spiked. Short films, however, dwell in a liminal space between movies and TV, and they simply don’t get the same respect and interest. Even anthology shows like Black Mirror, which might be described as a collection of short films, are designed to generate meaning through their juxtaposition. I know the stand-alone short film is still a rarity on my entertainment menu, and I suspect I am not alone.
In a sense that may be because nobody really knows what a short film … is. According to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences — the group that gives out the Oscars, including three for short films (animated, live action, and documentary) — a short film runs a maximum of 40 minutes, including credits. That’s about the length of a network TV drama episode, once you strip out the commercials, but a short film nominee could be, in theory, the length of an Instagram Reel. A feature-length film, according to the Academy, is anything over 40 minutes. But that has little to do with the length attributed to most movies. (When was the last time you went to the theater for a movie that was, say, 61 minutes long?) It’s vanishingly rare for any feature film to be less than around 82 minutes.
More here.