Short Films in Language Teaching

Where can teachers – and learners – find suitable material when they want to make use of short films? The following table provides a few suggestions (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4: TEFL resources

Short films may be classified according to length (one-second films, one-minute films, short shorts, etc.), genre (comedy, drama, documentary, horror, romance, sci-fi, thriller, etc.), topic (animals, coming-of-age, dance, superhero, etc.), or artistic claim (Heinrich 1997, Monaco 2009, Keddie 2014). Although in the era of post-modern hybridity, the boundaries between ad and art, or trash and treasure, are blurred, short films with rather aesthetic ambitions can be detected. These art shorts are also awarded prizes at international short film festivals such as the Tampere International Short Film Festival or the New York Short Film Festival. An example well worth seeing is Father and Daughter (2000), a multi-award winning 8-minute animated film directed by Michael Dudok de Wit, which completely forgoes any dialogues (see Pessozki in this volume).

Apart from art shorts, one can find several traditional types whose artistic ambitions are limited (Keddie 2014, Thaler 2014, 2000):

music videos

sketches / skits

trailers

TV news

weather forecasts

interviews

commercials

Brave new digital world has recently given birth to further innovative short film genres (Donaghy 2015: 25ff., Fig. 5).

New types of short films

1. Branded Shorts

short films created for a company / brand ▶ fusion between advertising and entertainment, innovative narratives, high production standards

2. Social Shorts

dealing with social themes such as poverty, homelessness, discrimination ▶ social awareness, emotional involvement, dramatic appeal

3. Literal Music Videos

music videos in which the original lyrics have been replaced by lines that depict the content of the visuals ▶ parody, wit, musical appeal, cinematic analysis (!), working with lyrics (vocabulary)

4. Infographic Films

animated representations of information, data, knowledge ▶ full of facts, appealing to visual learners

5. Viral Shorts

short films that become very popular through being shared rapidly and widely on the Internet ▶ funny, strange, powerful, discussing the impact

6. Animated Lectures

lectures created by pairing leading experts in a field with talented animators ▶ intellectual challenge, reduction of complexity by combining audio, text and attractive animation, presenting world-renowned experts (example: RSA ANIMATE: Changing Education Paradigms, talk given at the RSA by Sir Ken Robinson, www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U)

7. Split-screen Shorts

films with a visible division of the screen into two halves, with different moving images in each half ▶ discussing similarities and differences between the two screens

8. Response Films

shorts which criticise or parody the content and message of another film (viral or branded shorts), often in a humorous or hard-hitting manner ▶ criticism of the original, promoting critical thinking, learners producing their own film as a reaction to a manipulative clip

9. New Silent Short Films

shorts without any dialogue, produced recently ▶ lack of text, suitable for various proficiency levels

10. Mash-ups

montages or combinations of two or more already existing films ▶ promoting genre competence, producing one’s own mash-ups

Fig. 5: New short film genres

An example of a viral short, which treats a current problem in an illuminating yet non-obtrusive manner, is delineated in Fig. 6.

Fig. 6: I Forgot My Phone

The preference for a certain film genre may be one guideline when having to choose an appropriate film for one’s class. Further criteria of selection are the following (Thaler 2017a):

linguistic complexity

audio-visual comprehensibility

language quantity

didactic exploitability

pedagogic concerns

topical relevance

length

sound-vision relation

aesthetic quality

An example that fulfils quite a lot of these criteria is outlined in Fig. 7.

Fig. 7: Splitscreen: A Love Story

In analogy to the model of film literacy (Thaler 2014), one can postulate three domains and three skills for short films as well (Fig. 8).

Fig. 8: Short Film Literacy

Short films are predestined for cinematic analysis, so Fig. 9 outlines a literal music video which abounds in film devices.

Fig. 9: Total Eclipse of the Heart