Robert Short

I taught for many years in the School of European Studies at the University of East Anglia. I've written a number of books about Surrealism of which the latest is The Age of Gold – Surrealist cinema (Creation Books, 2004). In the late fifties and the sixties, I frequented the surrealist group in Paris. Over two decades, I organised in East Anglia some seven or eight, elaborate, all-night, open air happenings on surrealist themes, often attended by several hundred participants. I've always made collages and now also write verse. All the short films that are currently in distribution were shot on a pre-war, clockwork, standard 8mm Kodak camera – mostly on Kodachrome stock – with wild accompanying soundtrack on open reel tape. Encouraged by Tony Rayns, I first showed some of them publicy at the International Avant-Garde Film Festival at the BFI's National Film Theatre in 1970. As a member of the London Filmmakers Co-op, I used to accompany a selection of my films showing them to other Co-ops, film societies, university film clubs, arts labs and so on in the UK and on the continent. Apart from Rayns, early champions of my films were Jean-Pierre Bouyxou in La Science-Fiction au cinéma and Paul Hammond in The Shadow and its shadow. More recently, they are discussed in David Curtis, A History of Artists' Films and Video in Britain (BFI, 2007)

In the early sixties, I began making films by editing together brief sequences lifted from TV, home movies, stills from books and magazines, rostrum animation, pornography… re-assembled according to the logic of my desire. This solitary nocturnal activity grew out of the making of collages, assemblages, tape/slide programmes and the staging of multi-media performances and happenings. Both by choice and necessity, mine is a cinema of poverty, which unapologetically exploits the intimate peculiarities of the standard 8mm gauge. It shares the surrealists' suspicion of formalism, over-elaborate means, cheap sentiment, naturalism and agit-prop. In thrall to the virtualities of film, it presents a stream of night thoughts about movies that might have been. Its monsters and martyrs, abducted from their original habitats in high or pop culture, acquire new identities and new meanings. If all goes well, each purloined shot seems to have been made for the sake of no other film.