evidence: Enter the short film. Usually defined as lasting less than 50 minutes and constituting a self-contained whole, the short film complicates things in a necessary way, challenging our easy categorical notions. Like the short story, its analog in the world of literature, the short film can prove just as emotionally or intellectually resonant as a "feature-length work," and can even gain accumulate power through its concision. On the flip side, like the short story, it can also fall prey to charges of pretentiousness and a forced structure. A friend blames the tediousness of the modern American short story on a willful echoing of formal piety (and also Hemingway): vagueness, allusion, probably a revelation at the end that throws everything in doubt but leaves enough room for ambiguity. In other words, a preciousness. [...] There’s nothing wrong with that, but it also short-changes the shorts themselves. At their best, short films aren’t somehow half-finished versions, awaiting their complementary middle section, but operate on an entirely different structural logic. This also allows for both formal innovation and offbeat visions, snapshots of worlds that rarely make it to the feature-length screen.