Down to the Wire

Selections for this year's festival are almost finished. At the moment, I am thinking about short films and how they often tend to deliver the same amount of "story" despite their different lengths. By story, I don't mean plot. Longer shorts usually have more plot, but they rarely have more "story."
Plot complications that raise the stakes are not enough. Getting the characters in a tighter spot where they are more invested isn't the point. It is the viewer who has to care more. Raising the stakes is not about the filmmaker doing it to a character in the movie. Whatever happens to raise the stakes has to induce me to raise the stakes of my participation in the ongoing story. Putting the character through hell is just a tool to pull me in and is not an end in itself or a romance between the author/filmmaker and their delight in their own oeuvre.

This gets missed frequently in documentaries where each turn of events moves the story to a new place, but on the same plane. Another fascinating fact or event or insight moves the movie horizontally and eventually leaves the viewer feeling flat. Docs have more of an excuse for this, however, since reality is often picaresque. Yet many of the narrative films make the same mistake and at some point I get antsy because the film keeps covering the same emotional terrain even as the plot moves onward. A movie, or a screenplay, needs to move me, not the plot. And if something happens in the story because the writer needs it to connect the dots but the reader/viewer is not moved to invest more by it, then the writer/filmmaker needs to dump the excess baggage and focus on saving the ship aka the viewer/reader's investment.