Wearing Shorts on Saturday

you expect a shorts compilation with the title "friends and neighbors," featuring local filmmakers to be a distilled microcosm of the personalities and styles found in our fair city, and unsurprisingly, that's exactly what you got on saturday afternoon. I've long believed that the best part of the ethos, zeitgeist, je ne sais qois, ya ne znayu, or whatever bullshit tag you want to put on what's going on artistically in portland is the sense of electicism and daring, with a fair amount of humor and/or Lefty Outrage thrown into the mix.

while i only have two friends on the program (for one film, The Great Crane-Off), i feel like the variety and unpretentiousness of all of these filmmakers make them seem quite the neighbors, emblematic of the prototypical Portland, the city that's just so Gosh Darn Friendly.

we started with (i believe) Representing Abstraction, a beautiful, silent parade of film effects, water stains, burn marks, and more flickering past you in the form of animated stills, with a slowly changing color palette that finds warm browns and yellows to dark blues and reds. I found it both eerie and fascinating.

After the 16mm nostalgia-inducing "Happy Times", we were treated to a brilliant one-two punch to the gut in the form of "3 Out Of 4" and "Staring Newscasters". The former, a 1 minute ode to rotating advertisements and proper nutrition, paired nicely with latter's re-tooled footage of local news anchors, resulting in a subversive hilarity out of seemingly nothing.

But as far as subversive laughs go, there was no denying the standouts of the program, a set of unsettling and darkly humorous films by the Olsen Brothers, "Acmos L'equilibre Enegetique" and "Sacrificio Del Uno Mismo." the first, acting as a stage-setter, poses as found footage of an early 20th-century medical education film, with french narration. Our patient, though, happens to have a bulbous, maniacally smiling clown head, and his innards seem stomach-churningly soft and goopy. "Sacrificio," on the other hand, starts slowly and builds to a surreally visceral climax. A "normal" subject's metamorphosis is documented as a violent, disturbing transition between mankind and clownkind that has the viewer simultaneously laughing and cringing. "Unsettling" hardly does it justice, and the end, with its super-saturated colors and Central and South American religious homage, is downright brilliant.

Continuing the eclecticism, no Portland artistic event is complete without a nod to our liberal underpinnings, and this came in the form of "Air", a too-short look at racism and the Asian experience in America, centering around a specific incident of on-air racism from a New Jersey station. I wished that there was more time and resources available for this subject, because it has a long and untold history in this country (and especially in Portland's history), but the format here only allowed the film to be a short primer and came across more as an advertisement for KBOO than anything else. "Brave New Girl," set to a song by le tigre, said more with less. Rife with suggestive symbolism as a woman chows into a tableful of Betty Crocker dessert classics, pain, sublimation, violation, and exploitation are all brought to the fore without a word other than the samples in the musical track. I found it moving and raw.

"Self Portrait With Johnny," while not explicitly political, touched on the immigrant's life in America, and was also quite moving in its understatement, tracing the thoughts of one half of a post-war era couple as they move between central California and Portland. The simple outlines and warm colors were very evocative and helped universalize the narrative theme.

Of course, there was so much more to talk about, so much more than i have the words for. The surreal gay porn mashup of "Anatomy of a Line," the dark tone return to abstractionism of "Suture," the beautiful electro-color palette of "Best Not Sleep Through It All," the earnest hilarity of "The Great Crane-Off." I wish i had the words and the energy to talk about them all; each so different, and each so very, very, Portland.