Patrick Gamble

Patrick Gamble is a London-based writer specialising in film, music, and artists’ moving images. His words have appeared in The Skinny, Aesthetica, and Sight & Sound.

Patrick Gamble participated in “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025, a first-ever poll of its kind as a collective love letter to the art of short-form moving image. yanco and Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, in collaboration with Talking Shorts, invited filmmakers, curators, distributors, critics, and scholars worldwide to nominate 10 audiovisual works under sixty minutes that they personally consider the “greatest” of all time. This was Patrick Gamble’s submission:

While considering my picks for this poll, I found myself reflecting on how constricting our classifications of film can be; short or feature-length, fiction or nonfiction, and how these categories often make work that sits outside the commercial model so difficult to access. That said, I struggled to narrow my list down to just ten films, so I imposed my own rule on my submission: only films that have stood the test of time; therefore nothing from the year 2000 onwards. Otherwise, you can bet that Kevin Jerome Everson’s 'Ears, Nose and Throat', Shinya Isobe’s '13', or Ojoboca’s 'Instant Life' would have made the cut. Maybe next time.

— Patrick Gamble
Movie Original Title Director Country Year Duration
Meshes of the Afternoon Alexander Hammid , Maya Deren USA 1946 14’
Window Water Baby Moving Stan Brakhage USA 1959 13’
La Jetée Chris Marker France 1962 28’
The House Is Black Khaneh siah ast Forugh Farrokzhad Iran 1963 22’
Wavelength Michael Snow Canada, USA 1967 45’
The Brickmakers Chircales Jorge Silva, Marta Rodriguez Colombia 1972 42’
Elephant Alan Clarke United Kingdom 1989 37’
The Snowman Phil Solomon USA 1995 8’
Blight John Smith United Kingdom 1996 15’
Outer Space Peter Tscherkassky Austria 1999 11’