Bestimmtheit in Short FilmShort films have been around longer than many of us think. The very first films made in the early 1910s were not feature films by any stretch of the imagination and were never longer than 15 minutes. DW Griffith, known for cinematic experimentation, was the first director to venture into films longer than 15 minutes. These early films were short films (or "shorts"), these pioneering filmmakers experimenting with what they could and could not do with a moving camera. The first short films involved filming people getting on a train or some similar mundane act. People reacted to this and flocked to watch these films, simply for the novelty of watching reflections, instead of shadows, on the screen. But as audiences became more sophisticated, filmmakers began to feel the need to innovate. Experiments in surrealism occurred in the 1920s, with people like Salvadore Dali dabbling in the “new” art of cinema (Cooper, ii). Despite great advances in technological expertise and filmmaking technique, today's short films still suffer from the same limitation that their predecessors did: time. In order for a single narrative to be compressed into 15 minutes, the director and screenwriter must be sure that every single object within the mise-en-scène is of absolute relevance, thus maximizing the use of screen time (also known as "story -time") time", or histoire).This essay uses a contemporary short film and an 18th-century text to discuss Chatman's concern with bestimmtheit in films " a particular object and what this specification does to our understanding of the text. Furthermore, I will relate the compression of information into images with time limits, given that a short film has a limit of 15 minutes. To do this, I will analyze the cinematography of the short film and I will show how relevant they are in bringing out some of the scenarios described in Defoe's text. The short film in question is The Periwig-Maker, a claymation film directed by Stephen Schaeffler and narrated by actor Kenneth Brannagh, and will come. analyzed in relation to the text from which it is taken, A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe. To clear up some misconceptions about the origin of The Periwig-Maker, I would first like to add a disclaimer. Stephen Schaeffler had based the events on this