The One Minute Film Festival

The One Minute Film Festival

From 2003 through 2012, in a “barn cinema” in bucolic upstate New York, the artist-curator duo Jason Simon and Moyra Davey hosted The One Minute Film Festival, inviting fellow artists, musicians, writers, and moviemakers of all stripes to contribute a short film of their own devising. The festival became a cherished ritual: friends would religiously mark their calendars for the first Saturday after the Fourth of July, reuniting for martinis, gumbo, and dancing, a sundown screening of their cinebursts of creativity, then ever more spirited drinking and dancing well into the night.

The films presented in this screening—by artists as far ranging as Peggy Ahwesh, Mark Dion, Chris Marker, and Josiah McElheny—are a joyful sampling of the hundreds that were screened during the festival’s decade-long run. They capture the breathless ricochet of emotions—tenderness, silliness, outrage, and exuberance—that could be experienced from one moving-image minute to the next. “Ten years of multiple worlds of one-minute wisdom” is how the artist Andrea Geyer has described the enterprise. “Starring: Wasps in honey, cityscapes, trash, the president, local papers, dust, war, old movies, love, naked butts on tractors, news, records spinning, children spinning, dogs flying, banners flying, road movies, love songs, frustrations, montages…”. A more comprehensive survey of The One Minute Film Festival, featuring projections and movie posters, is on view at MASS MoCA through January 2014.