The Two Minutes to Zero Trilogy (Lewis Klahr, 2003/2004)

Fuck it. I just have no patience for (most) experimental/avant garde cinema.

Granted, my exposure is limited to things I've seen in various films classes and those bullshit Andy Warhol movies at the Wexner Center exhibit last year, but if Lewis Klahr's Two Minutes to Zero Trilogy is any indication, me and the avant garde just ain't meant to be.

Described by Klahr as “a feature length narrative compressed 3 different times into 3 separate films of diminishing duration until the synoptic is synopsized,” the films are made up of 16mm footage of an old comic called 77 Sunset Strip and edited so quickly and unintelligibly that Klahr makes the Bourne films look like Russian Ark (note: obvious hyperbole). My point is this: you can't tell what the fuck is going on.

I get that this is experimental filmmaking and that narrative structure takes a backseat to...whatever else the point may be, but sitting through over half an hour of old comics cut up, shot funny, and set to musical pieces of varying degrees of annoyance, well, it just ain't for me. [-] 23min (Two Days to Zero), 9min (Two Hours to Zero), 1min (Two Minutes to Zero); 16mm