Exquisite Corpses

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• Andrea Kreuzhage

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At the beginning of the decade — and the millennium, not coincidentally — a local graphic artist dropped a pile of cash on a thousand blank journals. He surreptitiously left them in coffeehouses and at bus stops, dropped them in mailboxes and dispatched them to faraway cities. Someguy, as he humbly ID’d himself, included instructions that the lucky recipients were to write or draw in the books, then hand them off to someone else. He also asked contributors to scan their pages for uploading to the 1000 Journals Project Web site (www.1000journals.com), and ship completed books back to San Francisco. But after three years, only one journal had been returned to Someguy. One might have expected a raft of musings, essays and diary-style confessions, but the book was crammed with all kinds of visual art rather than text. As Andrea Kreuzhage discovers in her captivating documentary debut, 1000 Journals, the combination of artistic freedom and random chance triggered a slew of who’d-a-thunk-it chain reactions. With Someguy’s okay, Kreuzhage embarked on a worldwide scavenger hunt to locate some of the missing 999 and record the stories behind them. Her one-of-a-kind film is an inspiring ode to the breadth and depth of human creativity, of course, but it’s also a delicate and surprisingly moving commentary on the mysterious, pervasive impulse to connect and communicate.
Aug. 1-13, 2008