Pioneering

Lawrence Lessig speaks.

(Lawrence Lessig's personal website.)

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Many writers are known as masters of the short story. Few filmmakers, however, are known as masters of the short film. Instead, shorts often function as an apprentice or demonstration form. In fact, shorts are often called "calling cards,” or movies to attract the attention of producers who will fund the filmmaker’s feature. I suppose this is understandable, given how much making movies costs - at least until recently.

Even our calendar accommodates features much better than shorts. We're set up for at least two feature programs every night. When we do show shorts, usually they get stacked together into "feature-length shorts programs." For example, IFP Buzzcuts and Cinewomen NY, two of our cherished long-time resident programs, each present a feature-length shorts program every month.

Yet in both the big bad world and the little world of the Pioneer, this means that people often overlook excellent short films.* In our modest way, we're addressing this by creating "Sunday Shorts," a flexible home for shorts on many Sunday afternoons and early evenings. The long-running Short Film Slam established the precedent for this. For the Pioneer's first several years, every Sunday at 5pm we held the Slam, which was a competitive open screening for shorts. But in mid-2005, I discontinued the Slam. The administrative duties were too much for our understaffed institution, and "slams" with two films and three people in the audience were pretty lame. But more recently we've indulged the legacy of the slam with these pre-curated "Sunday Shorts" programs.

The results have been outstanding. Every month, First Sundays fuse stand-up comedy and short filmmaking in hilarious shows. They're called First Sundays because they present their shows on the First Sunday every month. But this month they nursed their New Year's hangovers, and are showing instead the second Sunday, January 8. Now, the First Sundays guys often do make and show calling card films, but that's not all they do, and everything they do, they do well.

Now pay attention. I said that they are showing January 8. That probably means the day you are reading this.

So come to the show tonight. Buy tickets here.

And if you're into shorts - or interesting motion pictures in general - you should come out next Sunday for another "Sunday Shorts" program: "Cine-Poetry on the Web: A Year of ScratchVideo.TV." ScratchVideo.TV is a “vlog,” that is, a “video blog,” that is, an online video journal. It’s my favorite vlog. Every couple weeks, videomaker Charlene Rule posts a new little episode, dealing with some eccentric event in her life. In “Dearest Geraldine,” as an example, Rule engages in a conversation with someone who had telephoned her by mistake.

Often, the titles and descriptions of the pieces interact dynamically with the video proper, in a way that suggests an alternate conceptual idea. The recent video “So I was robbed on Monday” (aka “Caviar2”) - which may or may not be part of the Sunday show, as it is so recent - does not directly address being robbed, but does dance around the concept of seizure (as in grabbing, not as in the epileptic condition). Rule places the camera in front of herself, then swirls and clicks her fingers before the lens, with her own face distant in the background. On the soundtrack, someone - probably Rule - repeatedly sings out “carp caviar, carpe diem.” These lyrics refer back to Rule’s typed description of this piece being intended for another vlogger working on a project about caviar, a project she is indulging by somewhat oddly singing about carp caviar. But as she also sings “carpe diem” - Latin for “seize the day” - within a piece titled “So I was robbed on Monday,” Rule simultaneously alludes to the robbery when things were seized from her, and to her desire to stop being distracted by the robbery, to seize the day and get back into her routine. Meanwhile, the close-up of her fingers clicking together suggests miniature seizures, small acts of grabbing.

The episodes are almost always disjunctively edited, suggesting an endlessly curious videomaker whose consciousness darts about the world around her seeking insight and beauty. Fortunately, she is willing to share.

Charlene Rule will be on hand for the screening next Sunday. You can download most of the episodes that she will be showing from her website, at www.scratchvideo.tv. But you can’t download her - at least not yet.

Buy tickets here for Cine-Poetry on the Web: A Year of ScratchVideo.TV.

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* And yet not being noticed can, in certain contexts, be a boon: Latvian filmmaker Herz Frank, for example, escaped demands of ideological correctness by making shorts. The Soviet censors just didn't care about his weird little poetic shorts, and in this way Frank and others nurtured a subtly subversive film practice.