Bruce Conner's "Ten Second Film" is a rather odd film when taken out of the context of why it was made. According to the filmmaker himself, the extremely short film (longer than ten seconds on YouTube, but certainly no longer than fifteen minus the title card) was made when he was commissioned to design a poster for the 1965 Film Festival in New York, as a sort of advertisement to be shown proceeding the film showing. The humorous part is that the Festival ultimately rejected Conner's efforts, saying it was "too fast", an inaccurate evaluation as to the frame rate, which he helpfully pointed out was the standard sound rate of 24 fps, no more or less. An interesting story, which provides a bit of interest to this little-known structuralist work.
Conner's film is appropriate to start of a festival to be sure: all it consists of are frames from countdown leaders flickered quickly and mixed with other images, including individual frames with letters that spell out N. Y. Film Festival (which I know only by looking at a scan of all the individual frames of the film). The primary concept of it, outside of being a commercial of sorts, is to be reflective soley on the material of film, which the viewer is made aware of by the use of the film leader. As in the films of Owen Land or Michael Snow, this is a recurring theme of the structuralist movement; "Ten Second Film" is not the most interesting example of this idea, but for what it is a playful and innovative use of it, with a neat anecdote to go with it as well.
