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Britain
The one-reel film was similarly adopted in Britain and dominated the film industry between 1908 and 1913. As John Hawkridge says the tendency among film historians has always been to represent the British cinema as having had influential and innovative beginnings.' (Hawkridge, 1997, pg. 130) This is seen in Britain's many non-fiction actuality films, and narrative based series' films such as the commercially successful Lieutenant Darling series. The series' in which many short films were made over a period of time with a continuing narrative thread binding them, can be seen as an early form of the television serial.

Certainly, British filmmakers tried to push the medium further and were more willing to test the medium than their American counterparts. Sometimes this caused problems such as The Passion Of Men where the temporal logic of the narrative is at times disrupted when shot transitions are made by fades rather than cuts, and vice-versa' (ibid., pg. 131) Yet at other times their ingenuity worked in such films as the two-reel A Visit to Peek Frean and Co's Biscuit Works which is remarkable because of its use of high-angle shots, panning, and tilt movement, and its use of scene dissection to give a more complete view of specific factory processes.' (ibid., pg. 131) British filmmakers also pioneered the ingenious cheat' whereby actor movement is used to simulate camera movement' (ibid., pg. 131). In Britain the short film was being used to break new boundaries in the medium, it wasn't creating stars like the American films.

1.3 The Modern Day Short Film
By the 1930s the short subject as a viable commercial product in America was in serious decline. Charlie Chaplin had moved onto feature films and Mack Sennett was out of business. After 1935, Laurel and Hardy moved full time to feature films, which left the short subject bereft of talent and only exhibited via independent production houses and at times through block-booking. The reason short films struggled to find an audience was largely due to the exhibition of two feature films at the same time (the double feature) which meant there was no need for them. The short had become the poor relation of the feature film' (Eder, 2004) with short-film units relegated to run down pieces of property separate from the main facility.' (ibid.) But ultimately, it was television that killed the Hollywood short. As audiences shrank and production costs rose, it was no longer possible to supply the shorts. Nor did the

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