Whitespace Gallery is proud to announce the 2016 edition of the Short Shorts video festival with the title Jump Cut, and guest curated by P. Seth Thompson.

Selected video works will be shown at Whitespace Gallery in Atlanta, GA on August 17, 2016...

The French-Swiss film director, screenwriter, and film critic Jean-Luc Godard once said, “Every edit is lie.”  Editing is a fundamental part of the filmmaking process; it tightens up the narrative by cutting out extraneous information that the director finds to be unimportant.  It establishes a compression of time and space, becoming a transitory marker between moments that are shown onscreen and moments for which the audience needs to fill in the blanks.  Godard, and many other filmmakers, was an instrumental part of the French New Wave movement of the 1950s and 1960s.  Defined by its departure from established cinematic practices– the 360° rule, continuous editing, and linear narrative–of the medium, these directors created a new film language that challenged our awareness of the cinematic experience. 

One of the most dissected editing techniques is the jarring effect created by the jump cut, which was used in Godard’s eponymous 1960 film Breathless.  The jump cut is an “abrupt transition from one scene to another” that doesn’t mask the edit, but brings it to the foreground for the audience to consider.  It was discovered accidentally by one of the early pioneers of cinema George Méliès who subsequently used the jump cut as a way to simulate magical tricks or to create the illusion of a vanishing subject.  Taking his cue from the past, and reconstructing it, Godard shows the audience the actual illusion of cinema.  In Breathless, the camera moves with the characters and cuts from one shot to the next without a prompt or transition.  This compression of time creates an “unseen” moment in between the cut.  What happened in that moment? How do we make sense of the break in narrative? As image consumption continues to overshadow real life, our sense of truth corresponds to what we see onscreen.  These edits become nothing more than speculation as to what is actually happening; they are gaps in between the lies onscreen. 

For the 2016 installment of Whitespace’s annual video festival Short Shorts, artists are invited to submit videos that explore the moments in between the cut.   We’re interested in showing work that houses a deep understanding of each artist’s own interpretation of the theme.  We welcome shorts works–five minutes or less–from all perspectives that delve into the mediated and image consumed world around us.