Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet and The Cello features some the world's greatest film directors ruminating on time. It also inadvertently acts as a DVD microcosm of the shorts scene as a whole; the films variety and eclecticism is unfortunately matched by the equally eclectic quality.

The collection does feature some moments of short form glory, and all of the films are technically accomplished (as you would expect). But perhaps there is something to be said for not giving even the best directors carte blanche, especially on a subject as prone to philosophical posturing and pit falls as time. Efforts by Figgis, Szabó, Kaurismaki, and sadly even Goddard, are sub-standard or lacking in someway. As with shorts in general, it is the films that take a strong point and make it well that succeed in using their allotted ten minutes most effectively.

Life Line, Victor Erice's poetic slice of 1940's Spanish village life deals with the passing of time as a young baby's life hangs in the balance. Herzog's Ten Thousand Years Older revisits possibly the last “lost” tribe, which literally jumped forward thousands of years in evolution on its first meeting with the outside world. No-nonsense as ever, Spike Lee's short joint We Wuz Robbed, is a riveting talking head documentary on the all important 10 minutes that saw Al Gore being talked out of conceding the 2000 US election and requesting a recount in Florida.

Bertolucci's effort Histoire d'Eaux, based on an Indian Folk tale, beautifully deals with time, love and immigration lucidly and calmly – a masterclass in assured storytelling. Clare Denis' conversation piece about foreigners, foreignness and assimilation in France is interesting – but is a once only watch. Jiri Menzel takes on time on a more human level – showing us the ageing face of Czech film star Rudolf Hrusinsly throughout his long career in a moving and poignant montage. The British effort, Michael Radford's assured and elegantly economical science fiction short, deals with Daniel Craig's astronaut coming to terms with the implications with being away for 80 years, but having only aged the eponymous 10 minutes. Much of the rest of the collection is good, including Jarmusch's laconic look at a film star's trailer and Chen Kaige's take on the emerging New Beijing, but few are truly memorable.

So why do filmmakers make shorts? Especially if the audience's reaction can often boil down to confusion or bemusement? These particular directors have no doubt made their shorts to experiment or simply enjoy themselves, but for the most part shorts are the domain of the novice or up and coming director. Because becoming a master of the short form is currently far and away perceived as the main route to feature length filmmaking glory. That by building up a body of short work and entering festivals and competitions the budding director will be able convince production companies to let them direct their first feature. However true this may be it is an overly simplistic view of the wider picture.

Danny Boyle for one is not so sure about the shorts phenomenon. “I never made any short films – you have to be warned, I think, apart from Lynn Ramsey and Shane Meadows, very, very few short filmmakers really happen. I never made any short films, I started in the theatre, eventually went into television and made some one-hour films, comedy-drama films.”

That said, shorts undoubtedly present the wannabe filmmaker with a real chance (albeit small) to break free of the media-wide vicious circle/Catch-22: you have to prove you can make a film before you are allowed to make a film. A cheap 5 or 10-minute (or even a 30 second) short can act as living proof of the director's impending greatness and pave the way to filmic glory… or at least that is the way the story goes.

Shorts are perhaps particularly important to the burgeoning British film industry due to our lack of a fully structured, full-scale film industry. Unlike the US, we simply do not have the same quantity of opportunities for a director to slowly work his way up through the various stages of professional filmmaking, from runner, production assistant, second assistant director right the way through to director.

Before the recent dominance of shorts the traditional path for directors was to sharpen their skills with TV plays on the BBC before spreading out in fully fledged cinema, like luminaries such as Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. But sadly these opportunities simply do not exist anymore. Short films are the nearest thing to a film apprenticeship that many aspiring filmmakers can get.

Traditionally the focus has been on shorts as solely a director's apprenticeship. But that is undermine the importance of shorts as a launching pad to writers, producers (who are increasingly set up whole slates of shorts), crew and of course (good and bad) actors.

Shorts are probably even more prominent than they were just a year ago – let alone five years ago. Much of this is due to the increasing relative affordability brought on by the digitisation of film through DV cameras and home editing on iMacs, and the wealth of online resources and communities such as Shooting People and Talent Circle – resulting in a comparative democratisation of filmmaking.

It also used to be difficult for directors – once they had gone through the pain of acquiring funding (or not as the case may be), then filming and piecing together their mini-opus – to actually get their short shown. This is no longer true, with the sheer amount of festivals like Resfest, Raindance, Brief Encounters and so on bringing their audiences the finest shorts from the UK and worldwide. Plus the varied screening nights in most large towns and cities and the various internet streaming options like Atom Films.

A slight question mark hangs over most of the seemingly abundant shorts nights, screenings and “premieres” – who is actually attending them other than the crew and their family and friends? It is a hard truth that most “industry” people would not touch many of these screenings with a barge pole for fear of seeing the steady flow of seemingly identikit student film shorts peddling the same tropes again and again; the clichés of the “is it or isn't a dream/novel/film” or the ubiquitous madness films. Many share the same central flaw – a faulty or undeveloped script. And all too often shorts rely on the sudden twist or the misguided tricky punch line to get themselves noticed.

The UK Film Council is easily the main source of public money funding shorts in this country, including schemes such as Cinema Extreme and Digital Shorts. The latter is a nationwide initiative that sets out to find and develop emerging screenwriting and directing talent from across the UK and enable them to make innovative short films using digital technology. The usual complaints that many funding decisions are subject to passing fads, overt worthiness over content, the personal tastes of the panel and good old-fashioned nepotism, may or may not be well founded. And if such accusations are true? Well, to be honest any aspiring filmmakers better get used to it, as these factors are mainstays of the film industry proper.

One of the slightly ugly and increasingly obvious side effects of the much needed Film Council funding is that many producers are completely basing their budgetary plans around such schemes. If they do not get the funding they simply drop the project and try to find one that will. In effect, they have no Plan B, which could be stunting future producers' all important ingenuity. Another sobering thought is that most of these short filmmakers, even if they are talented and make a good or even brilliant short film, will never progress to the holy land: the feature.

But negativity aside, there is no disputing that when a short works it can truly hold an audience captive for those five, ten or even thirty minutes and be more memorable than many features – coming as they do from nowhere, without the baggage of hype that all to often steals the thunder from even the greatest of modern feature releases. Shorts can be beautifully crafted slices of cinema, and shock, horror… actually enjoyable.