He first insisted that critics were “wrong to believe in some special function of the short film” and, speaking for his Cahiers colleagues too, he confessed: “none of us has ever believed that on the one hand there was the short film with its principles and aesthetic possibilities, and on the other the feature, with other principles and other aesthetic possibilities.” He quickly qualified his claims, however, with a larger conclusion: “For there is no difference in kind between a short film and a feature, only … in degree. Writing for Cahiers du Cinéma in his capacity as reviewer of the French Festival of Short Films at Tours, and in his typically acerbic and cheeky way, Godard both dismissed the short film and then recuperated it. In 1959, Jean-Luc Godard issued a provocative yet ambivalent declaration about the short film and its “essence.” He said it had none.
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