It is the time of year when galleries often scale their offerings down, not to include less, but to show more, albeit smaller, works at friendlier price points for gift giving. As much as the art world plays by different rules, size does matter, at least when determining value.

Each gallery approaches this in its own way, offering “gems” in the case of Grenning Gallery, or “invitationals” like Romany Kramoris, or a “salon” like Drawing Room. It gives the galleries a chance to highlight the full depth of their rosters and make art purchasing affordable in a way that happens more regularly in season with fund-raisers and benefits, but not as much in the winter. It is difficult to get one’s arms around these exhibitions. With no uniting theme, you’re often lucky to find even a few vignettes that work together on the walls.

Ille Arts in Amagansett has done a respectable job this year with its holiday show. The artists include a mix of East End standard bearers with some participants from Brooklyn and beyond. The prices are on each work, so no mystery there, either. It is rather less distracting to have it there, a feeling of, “glad that consideration is out of the way, let’s now ponder the art.”

I was taken with quite a bit of work here. There was something about Amanda Brown’s “Rooftop” charcoal drawing that reminded me of early 20th-century artists making sojourns to New Mexico to paint the mountains and the adobe structures.

Matt Vega’s “Aleatory” is also a color­ful addition with a hint of early Mondrian thrown into what otherwise appears to be a reflection on pixels. It’s matched rather nicely with Tracy Harris’s “Avenir,” an encaustic and oil painting. Mark Perry’s “Rabbit” and Arlene Slavin’s “Intersections G” are rather striking. Elaine Grove and Ty Stroudsburg are paired together well: offering color-saturated landscapes that vary only slightly in their degree of abstraction.

John Haubrich’s “Pop” from 2012 is a surprisingly appealing paean to Robert Rauschenberg’s “Combines” but in a more handmade, painterly way. Linda Miller’s black-paper nesting bowls at first glance seem severe and minimal, but their delicacy and the evidence of the artist’s hands make them more intimate and approachable.

Most works are current and show what might be new directions for an artist, but there are exceptions. Monica Banks has an older wire sculpture in the show, dating from 2005. Matthew Bliss has some moody mixed-media watercolors he made in 2003.

There is a dynamic use of the photographic medium on display. Cyanotype, stacked images, and straightforward digital prints by artists such as Ellen Steinberg Coven, Joe Pintauro, Joan M. Kane, and Andrea Sher are included. Sometimes the prints are documents of other artworks or capture moments such as Christa Maiwald’s “Bouquet (Cake),” which shows a frosted layer cake festooned with seeds in a target pattern on a bed of intensely colored autumn leaves with a few purple blooms adding further pops of hue. It is very striking. For old school platinum prints, it is hard to beat Kochiro Kurti’s “Rock and Reed” a moody, meditative image merging land, water, and sky in almost sepia tones that look like drawing.

There is much more to see and explore in the show and even take home if the impulse strikes and the wallet agrees. It will be on view through Jan. 3.   

Boatbuilders, Ho!

Coming to you from a northern land of rocky coasts and extreme tides, Paul Garstide is out with a book for both boatbuilders and fans of watercraft as floating pieces of art. “Plans & Dreams: 23 Ready-to-Build Boat Designs” contains 217 pages of color photos, black-and-white construction plans, and essays that the naval architect and custom boatbuilder living in Nova Scotia has had published in Water Craft, a British magazine.

Mr. Garstide will sign copies of the book at a launch party at the Marine Museum on Bluff Road in Amagansett on Sunday starting at 3 p.m.

His essays not only entail specific techniques for the construction of wooden craft ranging from sailboats to dinghies, but also comment on boats and boating generally. The author emphasizes pre-digital skills, hand tools, and natural materials: “Simple materials raised to nobility by careful design and workmanship.”

“Plans & Dreams” is available at Amazon.com and from garstideboats.com. Ordering from the latter will get you a yearlong 50-percent discount on “unlimited digital downloads of plans from the firm’s online construction-plan catalog,” a release said.

Hardscrabble Tales

“Land Rush,” Gary Reiswig’s new book of four autobiographical short stories and two essays set in the Oklahoma Panhandle, focuses on small-town life on the Great Plains in the middle of the last century — fathers and sons, the responsibilities placed on a boy in a farming family, the rural elevation of high school football to a near-religion, and more. Tomorrow at 6 p.m., Mr. Reiswig, who lives in Springs, will talk about the book at Ashawagh Hall in that hamlet as part of a celebration that will start at 5:30 and offer food and drinks.

Rather than a traditional reading, Mr. Reiswig plans a give-and-take in which he will address, among other things, the question, “Why did I choose to tell these stories to represent the formative years of my youth?”    

R.S.V.P.s are being taken at [email protected] or 516-658-2832.

A free screening of Handel’s “Messiah” will take place tomorrow at 8 p.m. at Guild Hall. Christopher Hogwood, a noted English conductor and musicologist, conducts the performance by the Academy of Ancient Music and the Choir of Westminster Abbey of Handel’s most well-known and beloved oratorio. The recording takes advantage of Westminster Abbey’s fine acoustics and architectural splendor.

On Saturday at noon, Guild Hall will present an encore screening of Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg” as part of its ongoing series The Met: Live in HD. The six-hour epic comedy, conducted by James Levine, tells the story of a group of Renaissance master singers whose song contest unites the city of Nuremburg in the 16th century.

Michael Volle, Johan Botha, and Annette Dash head the international cast. Tickets are $22, $20 for members, and $15 for students.

The Hamptons International Film Festival is offering discounted Founders Passes to the 2015 festival, which will take place Oct. 8-12, 2015, through Dec. 31. The passes include express ticketless access to all screenings, opening and closing night films, V.I.P. events, all spotlight and centerpiece films, all general films, all panels and “conversations with,” and other special presentations.

The passes, ordinarily priced at $1,500, are discounted to $1,275 for this promotion. The first 40 purchasers will receive an HIFF apron and a starfish cookie cutter. Passes can be ordered at hamptonsfilmfest.org.

The festival is also accepting submissions for its 2015 HIFF Screenwriters Lab. The lab, which will take place in East Hampton from April 10-12, pairs established writers and producers with emerging writers, who are selected by the festival in collaboration with industry contacts.

The regular deadline for submissions is tomorrow. Late entries will be accepted through Jan. 2, with an extended deadline of Jan. 16. More information is available at hamptonsfilmfest.org.

Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor has announced that the musical “Grey Gardens” will be part of its 2015 Mainstage season, with a run from July 28 through Aug. 30. Based on the 1975 documentary film by Albert and David Maysles about Big Edie and Little Edie Bouvier Beale, the show has a book by Doug Wright, music by Scott Frankel, and lyrics by Michael Korrie. Casting and the creative team will be announced at a later date, as will next summer’s other productions.

In the meantime, Bay Street will be celebrating the holidays this weekend with “Mixed Nuts: A Classic Holiday Nutcracker . . . With a Twist,” a musical theater piece presented by Studio 3, the Bridgehampton dance company. Performances of the “mash-up of holiday books” will take place tomorrow at 7 p.m. and Saturday at 1 and 7 p.m. Tickets, which can be purchased by calling 537-3008, are $20 in advance, $25 at the door. For senior citizens and children 10 and under, the tariff is $15 in advance, $20 at the door.

“The Vendettas: A Rock and Roll Holiday Spectacular” will keep the theater hopping on Sunday evening with a performance by a trio known for its interpretation of 1950s jukebox hits, Rockabilly classics, and, for this show, rocking holiday tunes.

The Holiday Horns, Mike Ryan, a pianist, and Erin Doherty, a vocalist, are also on the program, which Bay Street recommends as a great holiday event for the entire family. Tickets, which are $15, are available at baystreet.org or by calling the theater’s box office.

It has been almost 20 years since the Danish filmmakers Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg issued the “vow of chastity” that launched Dogme95 into the cinematic firmament. That vow took the form of 10 rules intended to “counter the film of illusion.” Among the prohibitions: no special effects, no artificial lighting or props, no constructed sets, no superficial action, and no credit for the director. The camera had to be hand-held — tripods, dollies, and cranes were forbidden — and “the sound must never be produced apart from the image or vice versa.”

It has been argued that Dogme95 was the first serious challenge to cinematic orthodoxy since the French New Wave. While Dogme appeared as a new movement, and a website, dogme95.dk, certifies 35 films (though it’s not the official Dogme95 website, which closed in 2008), von Trier and Vinterberg have long since moved on, and the movement itself survives as an attitude rather than a strict set of rules.

That attitude is alive and well in the graduate program in digital filmmaking at Stony Brook Southampton in the form of the Dogme project. A recent conversation with Magdalene Brandeis, the film program’s associate director, and Lenny Crooks, a film consultant who worked with Mr. von Trier and Mr. Vinterberg, elucidated the connection.

Regarding the “vow of chastity,” Mr. Crooks noted that changes in the technology since 1995 have rendered certain elements unnecessary. The most important thing, he insists, is to “focus on the story you’re trying to tell and the way the actors are interpreting it.”

Ms. Brandeis supplied some of the background for the class. In April 2012, Christine Vachon, founding partner of Killer Films, whose more than 75 productions include “Boys Don’t Cry,” “Far From Heaven,” “Happiness,” and “I’m Not There,” joined the Stony Brook Southampton faculty, with the goal of helping to develop a new approach to academic instruction in filmmaking. Annette Handley-Chandler and Mitchell Kriegman of Wainscott Studios had previously hosted the college’s summer screenwriting program and practicums in digital filmmaking.

The first step toward a full-blown graduate program was 20/20/20, launched in the summer of 2013 and funded by a gift from Dorothy Lichtenstein, which brought together 20 filmmakers for 20 days to make 20 films. That program inspired Mr. Crooks, who had joined the department as a guest consultant. “The challenge of creating a film in just 20 days reminded me of a time when I worked with great people in Denmark who used to apply incredible demands on themselves to avoid the bells and whistles and tricks of modern filmmaking.”

Thinking about how to follow up 20/20/20, which had a second successful iteration last summer, Mr. Crooks decided to draw on his experience, which included not only working with the original Dogme filmmakers but also with Advance Party, a Scottish offshoot of Dogme95 that he helped found some 10 years later. “In wanting to teach how to work without all the lavish equipment used today, we decided that rather than just do it ‘low budget,’ which anybody can do, we would work within the context of the rules devised over a cup of tea by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg in 1995.”

The fundamental rule would be that everything put on film — sound and image — had to be recorded synchronously. Every scene had to be shot live, and the only editing allowed would be the cutting together of complete scenes. There could be no fade-outs, no dissolves, no layering on of music.

“Remarkably,” said Mr. Crooks, “these restrictions seem to have released the students from whatever limitations they felt they had. They’re rising to it, shooting fast, capturing the drama of the scenes to a much greater degree than my previous experience with early filmmakers.”

Ms. Brandeis noted that traditional cinematic “coverage,” in which a scene is constructed not only from a master shot but also with an assortment of long shots, close-ups, and reaction shots, was not an option. “You have to work with story chunks rather than coverage chunks, because image and sound must never be produced apart from each other.”

For the Dogme course, the students are producing seven webisodes with interlocking characters. “The participants had all created characters for their 20/20/20 films,” said Mr. Crooks, “so we decided to draw characters from their old films, work on them, and learn more about them. The students stayed with their characters and didn’t try to be consistent with what happened in episode 1. A narrative evolved out of all these, which is exactly the way it works with graduates of the National Film School of Denmark.”

For example, Melissa Bank, a writer and Stony Brook professor, wrote episode 1 using a character from her 20/20/20 film as well as a character to be shared with the writer of episode 2. Each episode will include at least one character from a previous episode. Several episodes have only two characters, but the final one, written by Patricia Marx, a New Yorker columnist and faculty member, uses all seven. Each segment is six to eight minutes long.

The actors, most of whom are members of the Screen Actors Guild, were all auditioned in New York City. According to Ms. Brandeis, “When we had our first read-through with the actors, Lenny said to them, ‘Now, we’re following you. You determine the story now and you absorb the characters. There is a script, but the camera has to follow you wherever you go.’ ” The actors wear their own clothes and make-up.

On a recent afternoon at the Stony Brook Southampton campus, Jill Campbell was directing a scene for her episode in a large greenhouse-storage shed filled with landscaping equipment and machinery, empty plant containers, tables cobbled together from wooden pallets, and other random objects, all of which constituted the “set.”

Mr. Crooks observed that the head of the scriptwriting program at the National Film School of Denmark, Mogens Rudov, “believes in the natural story and nothing else. A person walks into a room, meets someone, and you go from there.” That is a good description of what was taking place in the storage shed.

The last day of shooting was Saturday. Editing will begin in January, and the project should be finished by April. Conversations are under way with the Tribeca Film Festival and with Vimeo about screening all the episodes together, either in festivals or on the web. Each filmmaker owns his own film. “I’m hoping that the first time, it will be seen in its entirety,” said Mr. Crooks. “Once they’re online, the episodes can be seen in whatever order you want to.”

Ms. Brandeis is a producer and novelist who joined the Stony Brook faculty in 2009 and helped the program develop its Manhattan wing. She teaches writing and filmmaking and curates the Manhattan Writers Speak series with Daniel Menaker, a film editor. She first met Ms. Vachon at an event in the city, and the partnership grew from there.

Mr. Crooks was for four years head of the U.K. Film Council’s New Cinema Fund, where he backed the Cannes Special Jury Prize winner, “Fish Tank,” among many others. He also ran the Glasgow Film Fund and the Glasgow Film Office.

“What I did in Glasgow, what you can do in Denmark, what you can do in the U.K., and what you can never, ever do in the United States is to take public money and hand it out to artists without having any committee to refer to or get approvals from.” It’s clear that Ms. Brandeis and Mr. Crooks hope that will change.

The John Drew Theater Lab will present a free staged reading by John Shuman of “Underneath the Lintel,” a 2001 play written by Glen Berger, on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. The one-character play follows a librarian who discovers a returned book that is more than 100 years overdue and embarks on an around-the-world hunt for the borrower’s identity.

Mr. Shuman has acted on Broadway, off Broadway, in regional theaters throughout the country, and on screens both big and small. He has been seen at Bay Street Theater in “Chasing the Tiger” by Gail Sheehy, “The Orchard Play” by P. Seth Bauer, and “The Tempest” with John Glover. He last appeared at Guild Hall in “The V.I.P.’s,” written and directed by Cliff Robertson.

The Perlman Music Program has been awarded an Art Works grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The $50,000 grant will support the Summer Music School on Shelter Island, the organization’s signature program.

The school is a seven-week residency for gifted young musicians who play the violin, viola, cello, and bass. Led by Toby and Itzhak Perlman, the school’s faculty includes professional string musicians from around the country who provide mentorship and coaching. Students have private lessons, ensemble rehearsals, and performance opportunities throughout the summer that are free and open to the public.

The N.E.A. has supported the Perlman Music Program for eight consecutive years. This year’s grant represents a significant increase in funding from previous years.

The Shinnecock Nation Cultural Center and Museum in Southampton will hold its 13th annual winter festival Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. The free event will feature live dance and musical performances, food, children’s activities, and the Art Market, which offers authentic Native American-made jewelry, art, and other handcrafted traditional and contemporary pieces.

The museum’s Wikun Village tells the story of ancient life at Shinnecock. Native artisans will demonstrate 17th-century cooking, wood carving, and finger weaving throughout the day. The village staff will drum and sing at 2:30. An open fire inside a wigwam will offer a respite from the winter weather.

A food stand will have such traditional dishes as succotash, slow-cooked with cranberry beans, corn, and pork, as well as clam chowder, roasted squash, and more.

The Southampton Arts Center in Southampton Village will have an open house for the holidays on Saturday from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m.

In honor of the center’s current show, “Awkward Family Photos,” guests will be encouraged to take their own pictures at a holiday-themed photo booth with a seasonally appropriate backdrop and props. Those with ugly holiday sweaters or similarly themed attire have been invited to don them for the event.

Those who wish to attend can reserve their places at [email protected]. Wine and other festive refreshments will be served.