From: Joel Schlemowitz (email suppressed)
Date: Mon Nov 19 2007 - 11:03:54 PST
Jewels and Gems from The Film-Makers' Coop presents:
"1 Minute (+) Films From the Film-Makers' Cooperative"
7:30pm
Monday, November 26, 2007
Collective:Unconscious
279 Church Street, New York
Tel. 212-254-5277
"Brevity is the soul of wit," writes Shakespeare. Hearing praise that Shakespeare had never blotted a line, replied Ben Jonson, "Would he had blotted a thousand." Chopin's opus 64, No. 1 is known as the "minute waltz," but the title is apocryphal. The "Minutemen" were a militia during the Revolutionary War, a term co-opted today by ultra-right wing groups despite the connotation of lack of stamina. The Lumiere camera held about a minute of film. The Residents Commercial Album consists of 40 songs each exactly one minute in duration. How many seconds are in a "New York minute"?
Here are the one-minute films from the Coop. And a few one-and-a-half minute films too, included at the risk of challenging our limited attention spans. Yes, it's curating-by-numbers. The number "1 minute". The variety of filmmakers, familiar and unfamiliar, the works recent and not, the range of themes and approaches, show the range of what can be crammed into 60 seconds. Is it "quality not quantity"? A haiku is seventeen syllables. Yet it is doubtful that sitting down to write a thirty-four syllable haiku would create one twice as good for the doubling of its meter. Maybe a minute was all that was needed. Some work might be to our taste and some not, but with a screening of one-minute films we may not have to have our patience taxed. Said Mark Twain, "If you don't like the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes."
Filmmakers:
Caroline Avery
Bruce Baillie
Tom Bessoir
Frank Biesendorfer
Robert Breer
Don Duga
James Fotopoulos
Hollis Frampton
George Griffin
Henry Hills
Daniel Kazimierski
Kurt Kren
Hans D. Michaud
Jeff Scher
Joel Schlemowitz
Stan Vanderbeek
Lloyd M. Williams
Tung Wang Wu
and others
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For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.