Editorial

On the Poetics of Brevity

March 2025

In a 1967 interview with Ronald Christ, Jorge Luis Borges remarked: "As to my writing short pieces, there are two reasons I can give you. The first is my invincible laziness. The second is that I've always been fond of short stories, and it always took me some trouble to get through a novel" (The Paris Review, "The Art of Fiction No. 39").

Borges, a master of brevity, understood that complexity does not require length. His essays, poems, and stories distilled vast ideas into precise, concentrated forms, an artistry akin to that of photography, sculpture, and painting. These forms live between the fleeting and the profound, stripping narrative, image, and emotion to their essence and turning constraint into aesthetic choice. In a world saturated with exhaustive storytelling and lengthy explanation, the short form, whether in literature, visual art, or film, reminds us that brevity is not merely a necessity but a radical aesthetic, a way of seeing.

No cinematic form embraces risk like the short film. Unburdened by the commercial demands of feature-length production, short films are free to experiment, to challenge convention, to blur the line between the poetic and the cinematic. They work like visual haikus, suggestive and elliptical, or as bursts of intensity where excess replaces structure. Through blunt minimalism or layered complexity, they invite interpretation and demand participation, and often resonate long after they end.

At The Pasticheur, we rarely publish short films, not by choice but because few are submitted. This issue features four filmmakers whose work embodies that spirit of experiment: Gonzaga Gómez-Cortázar Romero, Tommy Hartung, Ivana Larrosa, and Owen Wood, also known as CreativeProject. Each, in his or her way, practices the poetics of brevity, distilling vast emotion into a glance, a cut, a frame. Their films remind us that what is left unsaid can be as powerful as what is revealed, and that the shortest works can leave the longest echoes.

In keeping with this exploration of brevity and meaning, we also feature the sculptor Zac Benson and the photographer Paolo Morales. Benson's work engages themes of faith, belief, and social commitment; Morales captures the isolation and longing of those pushed to the margins in an increasingly intolerant world.

Brevity in art is not new. Even in antiquity, the compression of meaning into form was recognized as a powerful aesthetic. Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian imagines the emperor reflecting on this very idea: "The written word has taught me to listen to the human voice, much as the great unchanging statues have taught me to appreciate bodily motions. On the other hand, but more slowly, life has thrown light for me on the meaning of books".

Hadrian's words suggest that just as statues compress movement into stillness, writing at its best condenses the complexity of life into a form that speaks beyond its limits. The same holds for photography and film, which capture fleeting moments and make them endure, drawing whole narratives and emotions into a single frame or sequence.

I am moved by the works in this March 2025 issue. We encourage readers to support artists and writers committed to exploring difference as richness, and to consider The Pasticheur a home for their work. Art, in its many forms, asks us to see more clearly and listen more closely, often in the smallest gesture, the quietest moment.

Jorge R. G. Sagastume, Editor