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 |
