Opening Night Review

The PDX Fest got off to a fine start tonight. The evening was made up of the first screening, a short titled 'Two Week Vacation' and a feature titled 'Old Joy,' followed by the Opening Party and an installation titled 'PRISM.'

Short: 'Two-Week Vacation'
Feature: 'Old Joy'

The short by Jerome Everson which opened the evening was only 1'15 in duration, and really only consisted of two ideas--collisions, so to speak--but it played out with such a gentle spirit that it was quite seductive. Unfortunately, I found the overall theme of the piece to be not all that different from a lot of commercials I've seen: two dollops of beauty wrapped up with an somewhat trite and ironic bow. So, I'm kind of torn on this one. Loved the imagery. Found the taglines (titles) simplistic and coy. But it was only one minute and fifteen seconds long--not much time to provide deep ideas (this one being, basically, that we fantasize of vacations in the Brazil but end up painting the house instead).

The feature by Kelly Reichardt is a film I also feel somewhat torn about. There are some wonderful, wonderful moments in the film which not only transcend traditional narrative, they reverberate and add a quite subtle depth that I really admire. Yet there were also several points in the film where the cinematography seemed to disconnect from the tone of the moment, kind of like an actor shooting scenes out of order and offering up divergent emotional tones which just don't gel when the scene is pieced together.

Nathaniel Dorsky does a wonderful job of describing such moments in his book 'Devotional Cinema.' I am thinking particularly of his discussions of Ozu and Antonioni--for instance the scene in (La Notte?) where the audience sees the mother in the foreground while the three principal characters appear in the background. These are moments where a film can slip its bindings and truly transform into something oblique yet stunningly profound. In 'Old Joy' there are many scenes which move into this area, but the few missteps--a shaky camera in the car, a couple of 'NYPD Blue' type of camera movements at the hot springs--were disappointingly disruptive for me and felt like moments where the film slipped out of the filmmakers hands rather than slipping any bindings. In many ways this is real nitpicking on my part and I am doing a disservice to the majority of the film which excels at escaping these limitations, reaching into deep and subtle places usually too scary for commercially-oriented narrative features and thus usually dealt with in a very heavy-handed way. 'Old Joy' manages to escape that trap and, for that reason alone, I expect this film to grow on me over time.

I'm less forgiving of the ending of the film, however. While one could call the ending a well-executed homage to a film trope of the 70s--the confused lost soul destined to be left wandering alone or chewed up by "the machine"--Dirk Bogarde in 'Death in Venice' or in Fassbinder's 'Despair'; Warren Oates in several films; Jon Voight in 'Midnight Cowboy'; or, as mentioned by the director in the post-film Q&A, the ending of 'Fat City'--I found this part of the film to be more derivative than homage. It answered too many questions for a film that, for the most part, is about questions rather than answers. In doing so, it undermines the all-too-rare experiential challenge of the film. Again, I am being pretty harsh and nitpicking in this particular critique. Few filmmakers ever come close to reaching the kind of openness and subtlety this film strives for and often achieves (Dorsky mentions three, maybe four; I'd add maybe five or six other names to that list), but I cannot deny the disappointment I experienced when the few specific missteps jarred me out of the moment. Regardless, 'Old Joy' is a film well worth seeing, not only for the direction and story line but also for the fine and understated acting which truly enhances the intimate spaces of this film.

The Party: free beer
The Installation: 'PRISM,' an "audio/visual live installation/healing experience"

The opening night party was fun. A lot of talkative people with, at least from those I met and chatted with, no interest in schmoozing for gain or influence pedaling. I had numerous inspiring conversations over the course of the evening.

I also really got into the installation at the event. Created by White Rainbow, I can only describe the installation as some kind of cross between the dream space of Marian Zazeela and LaMonte Young, the dream machine of Bryon Gysin, the abstract imagery of Man Ray (those wonderful explorations of grates and the patterns they generate when they cross), and the iconography of Kenneth Anger (specifically some of the Egyptian imagery of 'The Pleasure Dome,' if memory serves me correctly--or was it 'Invocation of My Demon Brother'?--both last seen by me over 20 years ago).

As I said, I really got into this installation. Its visual and sonic content and its architectural construction were quite stimulating. Within the installation space, which lived in a space separate from the bar and DJ areas, there were two "structures." These white structures intellectually evolved/changed from mountain ranges to tents to nomadic yurts with assistance from the soundtrack. Inside the mountains/tents/yurts, colored gels on spinning discs cast flickering and spinning light in repetitive yet, due to the spinning and rotating, random patterns. This was the Gysin dream machine aspect of the installation. I found the hypnotic effect strongest when I turned my gaze to the edges of these structures. At times, the color scheme evoked thoughts of the Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis).

The soundtrack for the installation didn't repeat while I was in the space, but the video did twice. Because of the random nature of the lighting in the "tents" and the asynchronous relationship between video and audio, there was no true repetition between the three primary elements of structure/audio/video, and the overall effect was quite relaxing, though there were moments where the intensity of the sound created unexpectedly transformative strength. Sonically, I was reminded of work by several different musicians: Jeff Grienke and Daniel Menche to name two. But these traces, occurring during different phases of the installation, helped to create a sense of progression that was, for me, easily converted into an abstract narrative of location (mountains/tents/yurts). One section of the soundtrack quieted to bells (cowbells on the Mongolian Steppes?) and ended with a cymbal that built to a nearly overwhelming swirling crescendo.

The visual elements for the installation were diverse but primarily abstract and pattern oriented, moving from expanding circles to grids passing across themselves and creating new patterns to more iconic imagery such as human shapes filled with contrasting abstractions and a closeup on eyes that evoked thoughts of the eyes on Buddhist temples. All of the more concrete imagery (the eyes, the human outlines filled with abstract imagery) evoked a very meditative central asian religious tonality, but the repetitive abstractions (expanding circles, intersecting grids), while quite beautiful and physically/optically effective, tended to evoke a more western grounding in illusion and trickery (think 'Anemic Cinema'). Colors were quite saturated, often blooming into massive blurs, and the combination with sound and structure resulted in an overall hypnotic and meditative dreamspace that was quite effective in attaining the self-described "healing" qualities of the installation.

In addition to the installation, I enjoyed several wide ranging and surprisingly deep discussions with people I met at the party. Often such party situations reduce to superficial pithiness (less kindly described as shallow uber-hipness) or longing eyes looking for someone to sleep with that night. But the people I met and conversed with were wonderfully genuine and very interested in talking about the evening's fare. These qualities made the party a genuine pleasure to attend. If I am making the party sound like a dry affair, it was anything but, for much humor and animated opinion entered the conversations. If I had wanted to go home with someone last night, however, these are the kind of people I'd want to be going with.