In Progress1972

Co-maker: Ed Small "All the short movies that opened yesterday at the Film Forum make some gesture toward elaborating concepts implicit in the nature of film, concepts having to do with its existence in time and the quality of its images .... J. J. Murphy's and Ed Small's IN PROGRESS is the loveliest, most idiomatic, most responsible work in the program. "IN PROGRESS is a 20-minute time-lapse movie recording the passage of days and seasons from September through May on a bit of landscape photographed on an Iowa farm. The camera doesn't move (though there are two or three slightly different locations) and it is so nearly passive that at one point frost is allowed to form on its lens, and at another the dew turns its image into a glamorous haze. IN PROGRESS really proves nothing except that it has a subject worth sustained contemplation. The film provides an access to such contemplation, and its beauty – including its ravishing variations of color within the natural blues and greens, grays, blacks, whites, and reddish browns – is in large part the beauty of the subject in view." – Roger Greenspun, The New York Times Awards: Refocus, 1972; Independent Film-Makers' Competition, 1972; Judge's Award, Bellevue Film Festival, 1973.