Anthology / Omnibus / Portmanteau films – while they go under a number of different epithets, what we’re talking about are feature films made up of short films.

I recently got back from Cannes where for the second year running, the festival profiled an anthology film. This year it was Tales from the Golden Age, which combines five segments from top Romanian directors to create “an unconventional personal history of the late Communist period in Romania”. Also just starting the festival circuit is the film 8, eight shorts from eight directors stating their points of view on the progress, on the set-backs and the challenges our planet faces today.

With this recent flurry one could be deceived into thinking this was a modern phenomenon. Far from it: anthology films have a long history and just seem to be coming back in vogue. If we go right back to the beginning we might ask whether the anthology film grew out of another art form. While the short film has long been compared neatly to the short story, films like 1948’s Quartet which illustrates a series of Somerset Maughn short stories would suggest that short fiction lends itself neatly to the anthology film format. But further back still were the ‘revue’ films such as Paramount on Parade which were common in Hollywood in the early sound film era to show off their stars using a series of vaudeville acts, suggesting a link to musicals, cabaret and theatre.

In the last twenty years, anthology films seem to have originated out of the desire to explore a specific theme. 1995 brought Four Rooms – a surprisingly little-known (considering the involvement of Quentin Tarantino, Robert Robert Rodriguez and Madonna, among others) anthology film about a hotel. We may already find an antecedent for this film in the all-star 1932 MGM film Grand Hotel. Jim Jarmusch’s 2003 film Coffee and Cigarettes depicts a series of different personalities who each have a discussion around, and sometimes about, the title’s two subjects. Meanwhile 2007’s Chacun son cinema saw the Cannes Film Festival commission the talents of an eye-popping canon of international directors to each produce something on the theme of the cinema theatre, which is somewhat reminiscent of Lumiere et Compagnie where 40 international directors each used the Cinematographe to make a short film, the original camera invented by the Lumière Brothers. 9/11 inspired a number of films, including 11’09”01 – September 11 which attempted to portray the attacks from different points of view around the world.

But by far the most popular stimulus for anthology films appears to be a location. Paris je t’aime – 18 short films commissioned to celebrate the city (there were originally supposed to be 20, one for each of Paris’ arrondissements before complications arose), is probably the anthology film which reached furthest into the mainstream, and general critical derision hasn’t stopped its producer Emmanuel Benbihy from ploughing full stream ahead with New York I love you (due for release in 2010) and an equivalent collection for Shanghai. Once again, these ideas may not be as original as first thought: Martin Scorcese, Woody Allen and Francis Ford Coppola joined forces to direct the triptych New York Stories in 1989, while Paris was the subject of Paris vu par [Paris seen by…] (a format which was exported to Canada for Montreal vu par in 1991). Last year’s anthology film at Cannes was Tokyo! – a feature offering three segments filmed by Michel Gondry, Leos Carax and Joon-ho Bong, each capturing a different essence of Japan’s capital city.

Critical reactions to all of the above have been mixed, and having been a short film festival producer myself, tirelessly championing the quality of quality short films, I must say that all too disappointingly often we find the most high profile short films don’t really cut the mustard. The talent, budget and subject involved in Paris je t’aime could have produced something quite dazzling, while instead most of the segments feel, for me, too much like tourist-board sponsored, celebrity-ridden, cliché-dripping attempts to be mini feature films. Perhaps this is a dangerously natural consequence of commissioning these films. Garnering interest at Cannes this year was a film in production called Women Interrupted which combines seven quality award-winning short films which have already been made, and links them to form an interesting narrative about different women from across the world who’ve all reached a crucial turning point in their lives. By replacing commissioning with curating, maybe the different segments will feel less contrived and of better quality. Perhaps this step beyond the randomized short film collection (cf Cinema 16, Future Shorts) is an interesting middle-ground that we will see more of in the future.

When thinking of feature films combining multiple stories it’s easy to slip over into its sister genre, the so-called ‘hyperlink’ film. A phrase coined by author Alissa Quart and popularized by noted US film critic Roger Ebert, this term refers to features where the characters or action reside in separate stories, but a connection of influence between those disparate stories is slowly revealed to the audience. Some of the best examples can be found in Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s gritty oeuvre – Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel – although it will be interesting to see how a rumoured credit-related spat with his long-time screenwriting partner Guillermo Arriaga during Babel may see his subsequent features take a different narrative direction as they are no longer working together (new release Rudo y Cursi will be our first evidence).

Robert Altman was one of the first to popularize this style in his portrait of the film industry, The Player and award-winning epic Short Cuts. Since then we’ve also seen it at work in Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic (whose use of the split-frame element helps to emphasise the multilinear narrative), as well as Paul Thomas’s Anderson’s Magnolia and Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana. Elsewhere, a high-powered ensemble cast ensures the equal dominance of multiple narrative strands in films like Love Actually and Paul Haggis’ Crash.

It’s interesting to consider Alissa Quart’s suggestion that this type of narrative is influenced by the influence of the world wide web and multitasking – two of the defining features of modern life. Indeed it’s surprising that in a world where few are immune to the massive influence of short form clips on YouTube and similar sites, that mainstream film culture is not responding more readily to the much-discussed shortening of people’s attention spans. The best way to deal with this is in fact high-up on the agenda of both Hollywood studios and TV channels, who are also considering how best to use the internet to monetize their wares. HBO are among the outfits experimenting with short form online content in their HBO Lab, although it will be interesting to see their monetization strategy evolve since one of their defining traits has been their rejection of advertising. Moving forward, if only one thing’s for sure, it’s that we’re going to see a lot of interesting innovation in that space between the short film and the feature film in the years to come.

Visit the first volume of our new online magathèque where you can see selected clips from some of the above films.