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MYST0 wrote:

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It's funny, but we will probably not even agree on what is a feature film and what is a short!  

It's been decided for us.  As PhantomXCI says, the industry standard has long been features are 45 minutes and longer.  Under that, it's a short subject.

But determining the actual running time is the trick.  With silent films there's a bit of a disconnect between what was intended by the filmmakers and how the films were actually exhibited.  While it's true that filmmakers had settled on a 16-18fps camera cranking rate, that's not necessarily the speed at which the films were projected.  Exhibitors were notorious for speeding up the frame rate to squeeze in an extra show or just to keep on schedule.  There are stories related from the era in which some films were projected at such high frame rates, in whole or part, that audiences could not follow the story properly or get the full effect of the film.

Filmmakers lobbied for standardized projection speeds, something which would allow them to maintain a standardized cranking speed.  When exhibitors failed to comply, filmmakers struck back by increasing their cranking speed.  By about the mid-1920s this speed had crept up to around 24fps which was considered something of an ideal, especially when sound became the norm.  It had also become easier to shoot at higher speeds with the introduction of motorized cameras which allowed for fixed speeds.

But it's interesting that filmgoers may have become accustomed to slightly speeded up action, particularly in regards to comedy.  You may have noticed that some makers of comic films continued to undercrank so their films would appear slightly speeded up.  Even as late an entry as Chaplin's CITY LIGHTS (1931), technically a sound film lacking dialogue or sound effects throughout, is undercranked for comic effect.  It supports the thought that for the audiences of the day, a speeded up scene automatically connoted that it was meant to be funny, and that's why we often see movies of the 1930s and 1940s with seemingly incongruous speeded up comic moments in a film otherwise shot at correct speed.  It's not due to ineptitude or stupidity, it was just part of film grammar back then.  Even today you will still see echoes of this nearly extinct tradition in certain scenes speeded up to resemble a modern audience's' idea of what a silent comedy looked like.