VISITING ARTISTS—Chaotic, challenging, and absent of marketable aesthetic, CROCK premiered in 1996 ("CROCK means well, but bad taste, amateurism, [and] idea rip-offs hurt it."—The Oregonian) and promptly sank into obscurity. Filmed with Hi-8 cameras and edited at Portland Cable Access, it stars artists and musicians from Portland’s 90s indie scene and offers a messy and doomed counterpoint to the boosterism and cosmopolitan ethos that eventually altered the city’s character. Inspired by the French Foreign Legion comic strip of the same name, CROCK is set somewhere in North Africa where revolutionary Pretty Boy enlists the aid of Legionnaire Maggot to steal the iron fist of Commandant Vermin P. Crock. Meanwhile, Pretty Boy’s sister Flossie plots her own overthrow of the colonial regime with the help of her all-womyn militia. Celebrating the film’s thirteenth anniversary, TBA brings together the filmmakers and cast for another look at a film that continues to vex with its weirdly puritan perversity and disregard for cinematic conventions.

Jon Raymond and James Yu record live commentary with interjections from cast members and special guests on Sept. 5.

VISITING ARTIST—Kalup Linzy has been creating episodes of “Conversations Wit De Churen” since 2003 as part of a multidisciplinary practice that includes videos, performances, and music. Linzy's satirical narratives are inspired by television soap operas, telenovelas, and Hollywood melodramas. They are intentionally irreverent and ripe with wry commentary on race, gender, sexuality, and familial relations. At once comic, raunchy, and poignant, they uniquely fuse dramatic intensity and piercing irony. Rarely seen outside of gallery walls, this screening features all of the current episodes in their entirety, along with special clips of the artist's music videos. Linzy has been hailed as one of the most innovative of a new generation of queer artists, inviting comparisons to John Waters, Jack Smith, and RuPaul.

Mature Audiences.

Portland artist and filmmaker Melody Owen has spent the last few years traveling—to Paris, Quebec, Iceland, and the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains in Appalachia. As she roamed, she collected video works from the artists she met along the way. Owen has organized them into two distinct programs. The first, CIRCLES AND SPINNING WHEELS, is a compilation of animations, mini-documentaries, music videos, and experimental films that feature the curves and planes of circles. This simple shape of Euclidean geometry remains constant despite the artists' different styles and methodologies. The second, IF I COULD CROWD ALL MY SOULS INTO THAT MOUNTAIN, features videos by an international cast of characters who have stepped from behind the camera and transformed themselves into both subject and performer. Artists featured include Boris Achour, Guler Ates, Barak Bar-am, Jean Charles Blanc, E*rock, Ben Fino-Radin, Liz Haley, John Hey, Gretchen Hogue, Cassandra C. Jones, Alexandra Lakin, Chris Lael Larson, Zak Margolis, Alicia McDaid, Ma Qiusha, Daragh Reeves, Michael Shamberg, Sigtryggur Sigmarsson, Catarina Simoes, Matt Underwood and Ola Vasiljeva.

"This is my favorite performance of any I have ever done."—James Franco. Recalling the intellectual gamesmanship of Robert Rauschenberg's 1953 drawing “Erased de Kooning” from which it derives its title, ERASED JAMES FRANCO is simultaneously a study of the craft of acting and of the fracturing—and reconstitution—of narrative and identity. While filmmakers in recent years have attempted shot-for-shot remakes of existing films (most notably Gus Van Sant with Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO and Michael Haneke with his own FUNNY GAMES) the emphasis here is on a single actor, alone on stage, recreating iconic film performances that have been stripped of their original context. In addition to re-enacting scenes from several of his own past film roles, Franco also reinterprets a pair of haunting portrayals of psychic disintegration and renewal by other actors: Julianne Moore in Todd Haynes' SAFE and Rock Hudson in John Frankenheimer's SECONDS. Denied the charged interplay with other actors, Franco adopts a strangely flat affect, imbuing the film with a quality that Carter describes as "bloodletting or a kind of cleansing…a building up and tearing down, simultaneously."

VISITING ARTISTS—Winnipeg-based artist Daniel Barrow uses obsolete technologies to present written, pictorial, and cinematic narratives centering on the practices of drawing and collecting. Since 1993, he has created and adapted comic book narratives to manual forms of animation by projecting, layering, and manipulating drawings on overhead projectors. For this live performance/animation piece, he combines overhead projection with video, music, and live narration to tell the story of a garbage man with a vision to create an independent phone book. In the late hours of the night, he sifts through garbage collecting personal information, tracing a portrait of each citizen through the windows of their homes as they sleep. What he doesn't realize is that he is not alone, that a deranged killer is rendering his cataloging efforts obsolete. “It's a performance set in a community that stands at the gates of hell, which sounds very dark—and it is—but I'm still in the room to moderate the gloom and darkness." —Daniel Barrow.

Curated by Pablo Ocampo and Cinema Project.

Admission: $15 general, $10 members.