"2001: A Short Attention Span Film & Video Festival," reads the opening credit. "(Not a Stanley Kubrick Production)." True, the visual fetishist and creator of three-hour epics might be put off by the sloppiness and brevity of a few of the 62 short-shorts in this year’s ninth installment. But surely his wicked sense of humor would be piqued by Ari Gold’s brilliant, one-minute "Culture," which was shot in accordance with the precepts of Gold’s own "Dogma 99" ("the film must be exactly one minute in length . . . the film must have no cuts . . . the number 3 must not be mentioned"). He’d like the workmanship but would probably be averse to the facile message of Michael Moore’s well-edited but glib "Testify," a Rage Against the Machine video masquerading as substantive political commentary. He’d appreciate the dreamy whimsy of Jay Rosenblatt’s "Nine Lives," in which an aging cat reminisces about hers. His misanthropic streak would relish the copulating chairs of PES’s "Roof Sex" (will furniture render mankind obsolete?).

And given his affinity for artificial intelligence, Kubrick would surely love "Night Shift," David Weir’s sublime adaptation of Douglas Coupland’s words. Edvard Grieg’s "Morning" (shades of 2001) plays over elegant images of robots and morphing test screens as subtitles explain that "no matter how powerful or extreme machines become, they can only be an extension of our humanity. Should the day ever come that the machines do end up winning . . . [they] will want to build more machines. But because they’re human, I think they’ll also build cathedrals. It’s those cathedrals I dream of seeing. Don’t we all?" We do. In the meantime, these movies are well worth seeing.