hrvatski  
Home
About us
Production
Publishing
Croatian film
chronicles
Note
Festivals
impressum
 
1997.
10

The one minute film festival: Požega

A minute five years long

An overview of the one minute film shown in the last five years of the International One Minute Film Festival in Croatian town Požega.

The film-cultural basis for this surprising time-limited discipline, introduced by the Swedish Film Institute and promoted under the auspices of UNICA in Požega festival, is contextually — historically and contemporary — quite varied. The very first one-reel films by brothers Lumiere were a kind of standardized one minute films; the montage-sequences in classical films were actually very short, internally closed, one-minute-or-about »films«; TV commercials have developed under the strictly standardized short forms, but forms often of substantial expressive richness; and at main festival of animation films there is a special award category for the films of minute-and-less duration. Limited by duration, one minute films are of unlimited procedural scope, though certain generic patterns can be clearly discerned. The short time presses for strong concept and an emphasized end-point. There is a strong narrative movement within the one-minute film toward anecdote film, a Witz based narration.

Parodies of other genres and film kinds are also established almost as a special genre: parodies of commercials, of popular films, TV news, public political and health themes (AIDS e. g.). There is a special autoreferrence genre, referring to the formal aspects of film, or to the one minute limitation of the genre: e. g. film that entirely consist of title sequence, film in which the statistics is presented about what happened in the world in one minute and how much words are contained within this one minute film, film about the search for the place where the film is being shot etc. There is also a specific genre of experimentally marked one minute films, some of them belonging to the autoreference genre, some just inquiring into the time logic, and material and perceptual basis of film.

Besides parodies, there is an established genre of narrative films with elliptical but often very complex narrative solutions, trying to find the topic and the approach that makes the maximal use of the available time limit. Documentaries are comparatively limited in number, but there is one pronounced line of »postcard« films about the towns, with some fine solutions. There is obviously a rich variety and an obvious advance in complexity and ambitions of one-minute films through the five years of its institutionalization in Croatia within the very well organized festival in Požega.



Dario Marković

THE FILMOGRAPHY OF THE CROATIAN ONE MINUTE FILM IN POŽEGA

View other articles in this edition...

 

new edition
archive
associates
subscription
impressum






Web Statistics