OPENING NIGHT!
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 26, 7:30
Old Joy
Kelly Reichardt, 78 min, 2006
Portland premiere with filmmakers in attendance
The PDX fest is excited to present the Portland premiere of the new feature film OLD JOY, directed by Kelly Reichardt. Shot in and around Portland with a small crew, OLD JOY has enjoyed much-deserved success in recent festivals including Sundance and The Rotterdam Film Festival (were is won a Tiger Award). Kelly, as well as key members of the cast and crew, will be present for this special screening.
OLD JOY is the story of two old friends, Kurt (Will Oldham) and Mark (Daniel London), who reunite for a weekend camping trip in the Cascade mountain range east of Portland, OR. OLD JOY is a minimalist story of friendship, loss and alienation in the Bush era. For Mark, the weekend outing offers a respite from the pressure of is imminent fatherhood; for Kurt, it is part of a long series of carefree adventures. As the hours progress and the landscape evolves, the twin seekers move through a range of subtle emotions, enacting a pilgrimage of mutual confusion, sudden insight, and recurring intimations of spiritual battle. When they arrive at their final destination, a hot spring in an old growth forest, they must either confront the divergent paths they have take, or somehow transcend their growing tensions in an act of forgiveness and mourning.
“Reichardt offers a contemplative anatomy of the fragility of friendship, bringing Jonathan Raymond’s acute, melancholy story vividly to life, drenching the screen with the lush greenery of the Pacific Northwest. The film combines Reichardt’s keenly observant storytelling with sharp visual skills, resulting in an individual work that is both impressive and unique in today’s indie milieu.”
-Emmanuel Levy
Proceeded by
Two-Week Vacation
Kevin Jerome Everson, 1:15, 16mm
THURSDAY, APRIL 27, 5:00
Lay Down Tracks
Danielle Lombardi + Brigid McCaffrey, 60 min, 16MM
This documentary follows the stories of five American workers who have chosen occupations, and thus a life, based around travel. A trucker, a carnival worker, a railroad executive, a surfer and a riverboat pilot welcome us into the intimacy of their daily rituals and the environments they construct as their transitory homes. Their stories meld into a conversation about the freedom of travel, fitting into new surroundings, the mundane aspects of work, and the persistent question: to move or to settle? Through the exchange of personal narratives, we look beyond the daily routine of work to explore the balance of intention and necessity in one’s chosen path. Together these transient lifestyles speak of local backgrounds, personal identity, and the nature of opportunity.
Shows with:
Vertical City: Morgan Currie (12.5 min, digital video)
Getting Up: American Street Art Culture: Colin Brown (15 min, digital video)
Meeting with a Mortician: Tom Hanson (2 min, digital video)
Thursday, April 27, 7:15
Cinema Project presents:
A Quest of Origins: Films by Larry Gottheim
Tree of Knowledge (Elective Affinities IV) [1981, 16 mm, 58 min]
Our Television Traveler [1991, 16 mm, 17min]
Artist in attendance!
Since the late 1960’s Larry Gottheim has a been deeply involved with cinema, teaching himself 16 mm filmmaking then developing the Department of Cinema in Binghamton, N.Y. This extremely influential department attracted the most talented artists, academics, and filmmakers of the day including Ken Jacobs, Hollis Frampton, Peter Kubelka, and Ernie Gehr among many others. In the 1990’s Gottheim has also served for a brief time as director of the Filmmaker’s Co-op in New York.
Gottheim’s early film prints have been restored in connection with an "Avant Garde Masters" grant through the Media Center of the Donnell Library, the Art Library of the NY Public Library. Elective Affinities is a series of four feature-length films Gottheim started in the early 1970’s. The Films are formal investigations edited into a structure involving formal patterning, with repetition and permutation of elements. Elective Affinities explores not only the film’s image and the relation of sound to image, a recurring theme in his work, and time but issues such as family, psychology, education, freedom, the theme of "nature" in art. Tree of Knowledge, the final installment of the series, serves as summation of Gottheim’s aesthetic as it contains within its epistemological questioning of the authority of images a self-referential return to the ground of experience and being as the camera returns to nature, the earth, and the tree of knowledge. Gottheim describes his newer work, Our Television Traveler, as “The history of space, the place of mystery, the mystery of trace, the space of history.”
THURSDAY, APRIL 27, 8:00
Out of Sync
the PDX video installation show at the Rake Gallery
325 NW 6th Ave
Out of Sync is a satellite exhibition to the PDX Film Fest featuring video work that exists outside of the cinematic experience. Video installations, sculptures, performances, and single channel works from across the continent.
Live Video Performances and artist reception
Thursday April 27 @ 8:00pm featuring The EarthwUrms, Ian Coronado, DISJUNCT, and Jesse England.
*The Rake Gallery is located at 325 NW 6th Ave*
THURSDAY, APRIL 27, 9:30
Who is Bozo Texino?
Bill Daniel, 56 min, digital video
Shot entirely aboard speeding freight trains and in secret hobo jungles, Who is Bozo Texino? documents a twenty-year never-ending rail journey in dogged pursuit of the true identity of the world's greatest boxcar artist. Daniel uncovers a 100-year-old tradition of hobo and rail worker graffiti and includes interviews with some of the railroad's greatest graffiti legends: Colossus of Roads, The Rambler, Herby (RIP) and the granddaddy of them all, Bozo Texino. Here is the everyday grit, myths, mulligan stews, hobo gatherings and, above all, the mis-understood and fascinating history of a hobo subculture that could only have been made by a wanderlust spirit like Bill Daniel.
Shows with:
Grand Luncheonette: Pete Sillen (5 min, digital video)
Branson: Music Land USA: Pete Sillen (12 min, 35 mm)
Twenty Minutes: Kevin Jerome Everson (3 min, 35mm)
High Plains Winter: Cindy Stillwell (10 min, digital video)
FRIDAY, APRIL 28, 5:30
Shorts Program #1: underground + experimental
Short works to twist and turn your brain cells
* Here Take these Drugs (Andy Spore, 1:00, digital video. Iowa City)
* Inhale Exhale (David Borengasser, 7:00, digital video, San Francisco)
* 28 Years In the Implicate Order (Pascual Sisto, 1:00, digital video, Los Angeles)
* Five County Fair (David Ellsworth, 8:05, digital video, Grand Rapids
* This Video Edited By Computer (Jesse England, 1.5 min, video, Eugene)
* Bobby XP1 (Tommy Becker, 3:45, digital video, San Francisco)
* The White Bunny (Katja Straub, 7:00, digital video, Germany)
* Square Millimeter: Cars (Luke Lamborn, 2:00, digital video, Syracuse)
* Tops (Brian Nelson, 5.5, digital video, Boise)
* Drew Getting Hit by a Car on Belmont (Andrew Francisco, 1:00, dv, Chicago)
* Shoot (Joe Nanashe, 2.5, digital video, New Brunswick, NJ)
* For Laika (Bryan Boyce, 1:00, digital video, San Francisco)
* Animal Animal (Tommy Becker, 1:50, digital video, San Francisco)
* Jawswipe (Jesse McLean, 2.5, digital video, Pittsburgh)
* Hotel Pinball Venus (Anne McGuire, Katya Knyazeva, Stan Yan, 1:00, digital video, Korea)
* (Dis)Placement (Aaron Valdez, 5:00, digital video, Iowa City)
* Square Millimeter: Houses (Luke Lamborn, 2:00, digital video, Syracuse)
* I'm in the Mood (Bryan Konefsky, 4:30, digital video, Albuquerque)
* Five More Minutes (Dena Decola + Karin Wandner, 17:00, digital video, L.A.)
* Lanka (Kevin Allen, 6:00, digital video, New York)
* Diagrams 1-5 (Colin Polombi, 5:00, digital video, Chicago)
FRIDAY, APRIL 28, 8:00
Arachnogasmic! short films by Martha Colburn
PDX special guest Martha Colburn presents a thrilling retrospective of her captivating and explosive hand-made animations.
Filmmaker in attendance!
Martha Colburn is an animator, filmmaker and artist originally from Pennsylvania. A self-taught filmmaker, she began making films in 1994 using found footage, a Super 8 camera and her own unique combination of painting and collage. She has since completed over 40 films. Based between Amsterdam and New York, Martha travels extensively worldwide exhibiting her work. Her films have been featured in museums and festivals internationally including The Whitney Art Museum, The Anthology Film Archives, and The Rotterdam Film Festival.
"The uniqueness of Martha Colburn, to me, is the explosive energy and craft with which she brings up-to-date, and pushes further, the film form of found-image-collage established by Stan Vanderbeek and Dick Preston in the Sixties. She has invented her own techniques and language that permits her to fuse the grotesque images of our popular civilization as produced by our image industries, to make film songs of universal sadness of our times." - Jonas Mekas (2000)
Program includes:
Cosmetic Emergency
A Little Dutch Thrill
XXX Amsterdam
Secrets of Mexuality
Skelehellavision
Groscher Lansangriff: Big Bug Attack
Cats Amore
Spiders In Love: An Arachnogasmic Musical
Lift Off
There's A Pervert In Our Pool!
I Can’t Keep Up
Evil Of Dracula
What's On?
Persecution in Paradise
Hey Tiger
Asthma
Friday, April 28, 10:00
Wild Tigers I Have Known
Cam Archer, 98 minutes, HD
“Logan, soft spoken, lonely, and 13 years old, is a boy with a crush. Unlike his equally lonely friend Joey, who obsesses over the sexual exploits of the slightly older, postpubescent boys, Logan is fixated on the boys themselves, particularly Rodeo Walker. Rodeo is the only one of the group of cool kids who shows any friendliness toward Logan, meaning he doesn't go out of his way to make Logan's life miserable. As Logan and Rodeo strike up a mismatched friendship, the kind that only works on walks deep into the forest when no one else is around, Logan's infatuation with Rodeo inspires him to create a new persona named Leah. Leah and Rodeo grow close through whispered late-night phone calls, and when Leah agrees to meet Rodeo face to face, it is Logan who must finally prove that he can ask for what he so achingly wants. Wild Tigers I Have Known is an ethereal exploration of adolescent longing. Cam Archer's storytelling is unconventional, fresh, and overflowing with the kind of heart that is touching and familiar to anyone who remembers junior high as a time of painful desire, confusion, and questioning. The well-crafted story, beautifully photographed, draws us back into this moody world of teenage isolation and eventual hope–a world that, perhaps mistakenly, we think we moved past long ago.”
Preceded by:
Brother Boy (Jalal Jemison, 16 minutes, digital video, Portland)
SATURDAY, APRIL 29, 1:00
Shorts Program #2: friends and neighbors
experimental films made by local and regional artists
* Happy Times (McCloud Zicmuse, 3.5 min, super 8)
* 3 Out Of 4 (Steven Slappe, 1 min, video, Portland)
* Starring Newscasters (Jesse England, 1.5 min, video)
* From Now On We'll Travel Round The Sun Together (Liz Haley, 3 min, video)
* Brave New Girl (Holly Andres & Grace Carter, 2.5 min, video)
* Acmos L'equilibre Enegetique (Olson Brothers, 1.5 min, video)
* Best Not Sleep Through It All (Chris Larson, 2 min, video)
* The Promise of Bio-Marketing the Human Mind (Carl Diehl, 5 min, video)
* Sacrificio Del Uno Mismo (Olson Brothers, 3.5 min, video)
* Representing Abstraction (Alex Stockwell, 8 min, 16mm)
* The Night The Whole World Caught On Fire (Cat Tyc, 5 min, video)
* Self Portrait With Johnny (J Hibbard, 4.5 min, 16mm)
* Anatomy of a Line (Matthew Vollono, 4.5 min, video)
* Clap On! Clap Off! (Henryk L. Bansales, 7:45, video)
* Air (Patti Sakurai, 5 min, super 8/ video)
* 60(2) (Tony Schilling, 2.5 min, super 8/ video)
* Suture (Lindsey Lodhie, 4.5 min, video)
* The Saloon (Sarah Halpern, 6 min, video)
* The Great Crane Off (Afryl & Merrill, 11.5 min, video)
SATURDAY, APRIL 29, 3:30
Blockade + How Little We Know
Blockade
Sergei Loznitsa, 50 min, 35mm, Russia/Germany
“Impressive visual material of the siege of Leningrad as a breathtaking reanimation of reality. The images comprise only material Sergei Loznitsa found in the archives in Moscow about the siege of Leningrad during the World War II. By providing the originally silent images with a meticulously reconstructed and almost perfect soundtrack, the scenes from everyday life under siege seem to be set in the present. By not intervening in the montage but giving the scenes room to tell a story, the scenes transcend the specific historic events and lead a new life. They do not evoke memories of the past, but become a breathtaking reanimation of reality.”
How Little We Know of Our Neighbours
Rebecca Baron, 49 min, video, LA
How Little We Know of Our Neighbours is an experimental documentary about Britain’s Mass Observation Movement and its relationship to contemporary issues regarding surveillance, public self-disclosure, and privacy. At its center is a look at the multiple roles cameras have played in public space, starting in the 1880s, with the introduction of the hand-held cameras. The film proceeds to trace the history of Mass Observation from anthropological studies in 1930s through its reincarnation as a civil spy unit during World War II to its present-day uses in police surveillance, web cams and reality television, all the while questioning our notions of privacy and self-definition.
SATURDAY, APRIL 29, 6:00
The Tailenders
Adele Horne, 72:00, digital video, Los Angeles
Gospel Recordings is an evangelical organization founded in 1939 whose mission is to record and distribute stories from the bible in all the languages and dialects of the world. Now, more than sixty years into their effort, the organization has honed their sights on the population they call the tailenders, so dubbed because they are the last to be reached by the evangelicals. Outfitted with recording devices and primitive playback appliances, the missionaries frequently target communities in crisis because they have found these communities to be particularly receptive to the evangelical message. The Tailenders, filmmaker Adele Horne’s feature debut, follows Gospel Recordings as they interact with indigenous cultures and in doing so, weaves a complex commentary on global capitalism, religion, and the power of the human voice.
Preceded by:
Pvt. Boro (Alma Boro, 8:50, digital video, Chicago)
SATURDAY, APRIL 29, 9:00
The 2006 Peripheral Produce Invitational!
The Peripheral Produce invitational is an annual rock-em-sock-em film showdown that is widely considered the World Championship of experimental cinema. The qualifying artists are selected up to a year before the event and invited to make a new project for competition. Some artists complete their films months in advance, while others cloak themselves in mystery and work on their piece right until the final moment. All the competing artists must be in attendance, and there is a ten-minute time limit. To cap it all off, bingo is played during the evening’s format changes.
In 2005, history was made as Vladimir became the first ever Back-to-Back winner. In similar fashion as ‘04, Vladimir showed up to the theatre with 400 view-masters in tow, distributed them amongst the capacity crowd, and conducted her signature “communal view-master experience” with disks that she photographed, cut-out, and glued together by hand.
The Invitational has proven to be the perfect platform for non-conventional film presentation. PPI 2001 featured Craig Baldwin and Bill Daniel simultaneously running twelve 16mm film projectors. 2001 also featured an Animal Charm live video mix as well as Melinda Stone and Kate Haug incorporating the audience to supply the soundtrack for their film. The 2002 Invitational featured film-projector-performances from Sandra Gibson and Louis Recoder as well as the Distance Formula. In 2004, Reed Harkness shot a Super 8 film at the theatre as the audience was arriving, and then quickly processed the film in the men’s restroom and projected it during the second half of the show. In ’05 Eric Ostrowski taped film to the sidewalk in front of the theatre for days leading up to the event, and then spliced it together and projected it with an accompanying live soundtrack.
What will happen this year? Who will walk away with the trophy? Tune in to find out.
The PPI V roster of competitors:
Returning champion:
Vladimir : Portland
Chel White : Portland
David Gatten : New York
Ryan Jeffery : Portland
Martha Colburn : New York
Julie Orser : Los Angeles
Jalal Jemison : Portland
Anne McGuire : San Francisco
Jim Blashfield : Portland
Alex Mackenzie : Vancouver, BC
Karl Lind : Portland
Ted Passon : Philadelphia
Orland Nutt : Portland
Salise Hughes : Seattle
plus surprises
SUNDAY, APRIL 30, 1:00
David Gatten:
Secret History of the Diving Line, A True Account in Nine Parts (Parts I-IV)
co-presented with Cinema Project
Over the last ten years David Gatten's films have explored the intersection of the printed word and the moving image, while investigating the shifting vocabularies of experience and representation within intimate spaces and historical documents. Through traditional research methods and non-traditional film processes, the films trace the contours of both private lives and public histories, combining elements of philosophy, biography and poetry with experiments in cinematic forms and narrative structures. Currently Gatten is at work on a series of nine films about letters, lovers, books, ghosts and the Byrd family of Virginia during the early 18th century. This program will look at the first four of the series.
Secret History of the Diving Line
(1996-2002, 20 minutes, silent, black & white 16mm film)
“Conflicting descriptions of the same territory by the same William Byrd fracture in an attempt to inhabit the same space, yielding to obscure landscapes that vividly depict the numerical distances relegated to an appendix. As subtly rhythmic and droll as it is outwardly austere, David Gatten’s continued perusal of the Byrd library rewards patience with its faithful curiosity.”
The Great Art of Knowing
(2004, 37 minutes, silent, black & white 16mm film)
Love finds purchase between tightly shelved volumes. In the spaces between the letters. In the lines themselves. An antinomian cinema seems possible. A gentle iconoclasm? The image is always backwards in a mirror. The story unfolds slowly. The fourth film in the Byrd project.
MOXON’S MECHANICK EXERCISES, OR, THE DOCTRINE OF HANDY-WORKS APPLIED TO THE ART OF PRINTING
(1999, 26 minutes, silent - 18 fps, black & white 16mm film)
This handmade film, with its images generated almost entirely from cellophane tape, proceeds from the landmark moment in the middle of the fifteenth century when Gutenberg inaugurated the use of movable type in the West with his 42-line Bible. Using a cameraless tape and ink transfer process, words themselves were lifted from a number of historical texts, the ink-words were fixed directly onto a clear film base and some 24,000 individual frames of text were contact printed onto 16mm film stock.
THE ENJOYMENT OF READING (LOST & FOUND)
(2001, 16 minutes, silent – 18fps, color and black & white 16mm film)
Sunday, April 30, 3:15
Shorts Program #3: short documentaries
The Power of the People Don’t Stop
* Like Being Pursued By A Boulder (Brian Coffey, 6:00, 16mm, Milwaukee)
* Jean Genet in Chicago (Frédéric Moffet, 25:00, digital video, Chicago)
* Don’t Call Me Crazy on the 4th of July (Richard Pell, 29:30, digital video, Ann Arbor)
* lot 63, grave C (Sam Green, 9:30, digital video, San Francisco)
* One Dead in Ohio (Robert Greene, 10:00, digital video, Brooklyn)
SUNDAY, APRIL 30, 5:30
Shorts Program #4: experimental + avant garde
* L’Éclat du mal/The Bleeding Heart of It (Louise Bourque, 8:00, 35mm, Boston)
* Eclipse (Jeanne Liotta, 4:00, 16mm, New York)
* Black and White Trypps Number Two (Ben Russell, 16mm, 6:00, Providence)
* Elsewhere (Luke Sieczek, 6:00, 16mm, Milwaukee)
* The Devil and The Fly (Claire Fowler, 8:00, 16mm, Bristol)
* Still Life w/ Fruit (Eric Fleischauer, 4:30,16mm, Pittsburgh)
* Skull and Blackberries (Eric Ostrowski, 4:00, 16mm, Seattle)
* The Hummingbird (Eric Ostrowski, 2:00,16mm, Seattle)
* Pulling Down the Sun to Give You The Sky (Tommy Becker, 1:50, DV, San Francisco)
* Amelita Destruction (Potter-Belmar Labs, 4:30, DV, San Antonio)
* The Boy in the Air (Lyn Elliot, 2:00, DV, State College, PA)
* Fire Escape (Carl Lee, 4:10, DV, Buffalo)
* Train Tower (David Crompton & Andrew Herfst, 3:00, DV, Vancouver, B.C.)
* Ocean’s Memory (David Crompton & Andrew Herfst, 5:00, DV, Vancouver, B.C.)
* My Mother (Sadie Tillery,12:00, DV, Raleigh, NC)
SUNDAY, APRIL 30, 8:00
The Other Side
Bill Brown, 45 min, 16mm, Detroit
A 2000-mile journey along the U.S./Mexico border reveals a geography of aspiration and insecurity. While documenting the efforts of migrant activists to establish a network of water stations in the borderlands of the southwestern U.S., Brown considers the border as a landscape, at once physical, historical, and political.
Shows with:
Martinis In The Bike Lane (Joe Biel, 11 min, video, Portland)
Bessie Cohen, Survivor If the 1911 Shirtwaist Fire (Hope Tucker, 3 min, video, Savanah, GA)
Alternative Forms Of Energy (Jennifer Proctor, 4 min, super 8/ video, Iowa City)
S A V E (Roger Beebe, 5 min, 16mm/ video, Florida)
Returning (Nancy Jean Tucker, 3.5 min, video, Los Angeles)
Losing Lusk (Vance Malone, 7 min, video, Portland)
Tidal Wave (Salise Hughes, 1.5 min, 16mm/ video, Seattle)
Dandelion (Holly Andres & Grace Carter, 7.5 min, 16mm/ video, Portland)
SUNDAY, APRIL 30, 9:30
Closing Night Party
Valentine’s (232 SW Ankeny)
To wrap up the festival, please join us at Valentine’s as we say good-bye to PDX 2006. |
