PDX Film Fest 2007: May 2007 Archives

You don't have to have known Helen Hill to be fully affected and changed by her presence. There are always a few people in the community that are full of spirit, generosity, warmth and love; that always manage to make us feel alive and beautiful. They seem to ground us in the simple essences of life, always encouraging and nurturing us. Helen Hill is one of these people.

The screening program of Helen Hill Remembered was an incredibly emotional experience for me. Her films communicated a person full of spirit, warmth, love and excitement for life. The watercolor backgrounds, tiny ink and construction paper characters, sweet stop motion, organic tones and soft voices brought me into a place normally kept in childhood; a place of safety and intimacy.

I wasn't able to sit in the whole presentation and sharing that encompassed her memorial screening. The day before I went to a memorial of a dear friend in my community who died at the age of 29 to stomach cancer. The tactile quality of Helen Hill's films and the incredible affect she had on her community was too close to home.

We are lucky to have been touched by these incredible people, and it is absolutely heartbreaking to see them go. I hope that Hellen Hill's films become more accessible to people, so that her spirit might warm this world in communities that don't have the luxury of her presence.

The festival proved incredibly overstimulating for me, so I unconsciously allowed this two or so weeks to go by before writing any more reflections on the films and surrounding experience. I apologize for anyone counting on the blog for up-to-date incentive to participate in the festivities. For now, let this be yours for next year!

The Sunday Shorts Program #4: The Cult of the Mustache and Other Cultural Phenomena was an incredible series, touted by all those who saw it as perhaps the best program of the entire festival. Because of my thesis work I was only able to catch the last film; and kicked myself deeply for being so responsible.

The Light Is Waiting by Michael Robinson proved an incredible ballzout blowout of finale. The film was entirely comprised of episodes from Full House. The beginning starts us off like any other episode, but completely breaks down at the drop of a TV. Existentialism and intimate horror swirl in as we are taken into a truly psychedelic journey into the cosmic underbelly of Full House.

Made perhaps fully with the program Aftereffects, it facilitated a very deep visual jam of effects and tricks; a kind of post-modern mandala for the new New age. Tony Conrad's groundbreaking film Flicker came to mind as the images of the happy family on a vacation to Hawaii breaks into red strobing and slow motion morphs, keeping me dead in my seat. A large portion of the piece is a symmetrical morph of different vacation scenes akin to some kind of mash-up of Family Circus and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom injected with a little dose of Holy Mountain.

I had to let a laugh escape at the end when Jesse is singing to a sold out beach crowd, holding an Olsen baby. The mandala symmetry morphs Jesse into the baby, almost as if to name her the new postmodern leader.

Amy Bernstein at PORT writes a nice review of the PDX Fest's video installation exhibit HERE

"Upon entering the opening show for this year's PDX Film Fest, one encountered a shift in perception; the space-time continuum linear living was altered somehow, and the viewer suddenly found him/herself immersed completely within a realm of video..."

Shawn Levy, head movie critic at The Oregonian, blogs the Peripheral Produce Invitational:

"PDX Fest: Another Amazing Invitational
Posted by slevy April 30, 2007

It's a hazard of a job like mine -- banging the drum in public about this or that film or film event -- that people will actually take my advice and go spend time and money and wind up disappointed with what they see and, by extension, me.

But anyone who heeded my call to attend the 2007 Portland Documentary and eXperimental Film Festival (AKA the PDX Fest) and, in particular, the Peripheral Produce Invitational on Saturday night, can't possibly have been anything other than tickled, entertained and uplifted by what they saw. I've attended four of the six invitationals and they're all like dim sum luncheons: full of delicious variety and impossible to prefer to any of the other similarly wonderful banquets you've enjoyed.

On Saturday night, some 400-plus attendees filled the main auditorium of the Hollywood Theatre to watch and vote on brand-new works from a dozen filmmakers chosen by PDX Fest honcho Matt McCormick from among previous Invitational winners, local talent, filmmakers who had other works in the five-day event, and through-the-transom submissions. The variety, wit, craft and spirit were all high, and the evening reached a crescendo at the award ceremony that nobody might have predicted. And choosing a winner -- each person in attendance was allowed to select one film for the top prize -- was no easy task.

After having a chance to gander at Devon Damonte's "Great Garbage Patch Kids" crafty installation on Sandy Blvd. (it was an old Toyota pickup turned into a multimedia projector delivering a message about global warming), the audience was warmed up by McCormick himself, who described the format of the evening and began an evening-long game of Pabst Bingo, which kept folks entertained (and treated to nifty prizes) through the occasional equipment changeover or mechanical glitch.

Then came the films. And they were good. San Francisco's Bryan Boyce kicked off the show with "Rumsfeld Rules," one of his patented remixes of dull speeches by powerful men. Recutting a CSPAN interview with Donald Rumsfeld so that the former Secretary of Defense said things like "I think the founding fathers of this nation were traitors....I would like to drop a nuclear weapon on them." It brought down the house.

Soon, Melinda Stone, another California filmmaker, had the audience singing along to her concertina and participating in a film about life and death on her farm, "Have You Seen the Duckalitos?" And yet another Golden Stater, Paul VanDeCarr offered the moody and luxurious "San Francisco Empty," a study of depopulated spaces -- natural and manmade -- in the city by the bay. Brad Hutchinson of Olympia, Washington, made a vivid impression with the (apparently) autobiographical "My Primary Colors," a study of his parents and home presented in overlapping images from three projectors.

There were fun works from Portland filmmakers as well. Vanessa Renwick, who won the very first Invitational, presented "Red Stallion's Revenge," her remixed, re-scored version of a 1943 western about a battle between a horse and a bear. Jeremy Bird's "Drums and Lines" was a sharply-cut study of sound and editing. And the duo known as Hooliganship did amazing and amusing things with confetti, musical instruments and impressive 3-D animation in a presentation called "REALER."

But the surprise of the evening was filmmaker George Andrus of Albany, Oregon, who presented the dazzling and puzzling "Dancing Rainbows," an excerpt from an hour-long film he's been working on for six or seven years. Andrus, wearing a natty sports coat and tie, introduced the film as a study of visual properties of Palmolive dish soap, which got the crowd laughing. As Andrus was by several decades the oldest person in attendance and spoke in a deep, grandiloquent tone, there was a sense that he wasn't necessarily who he said he was, that some young filmmaker -- perhaps Portlander Rob Tyler, who helped edit "Dancing Rainbows" -- was pulling the strings here and was using this polite, elegant man as a kind of Larry "Bud" Melman figure for our amusement.

Then the film began, and it was a jaw-dropper. This wasn't a phony; this was an undiscovered genius of an usual, folk-craft stripe. Using macro-zoom lenses, Andrus presented deliriously psychedelic abstracts of color, light and form, with patterns of soap film (sometimes augmented with mirrors) capturing the looks of natural phenomena, geometric patterns, jewelry and even human and alien faces. The images were accompanied by Andrus' droll and eloquent commentary. And the thing was a massive hit, creating enormous buzz in the lobby during the intermission and after the show, when attendees strolled a few blocks to the venerable Pagoda restaurant for drinks, food and the awards ceremony.

After announcing the runner-up awards (in venerable PDX Fest tradition, everyone but the winner once again tied for second place), McCormick presented first prize to Andrus, whose eyes an welled with tears as he thanked what he called "an extremely lovely crowd" for being "so vivacious and gracious and accommodating in every way."

Speaking a few minutes later, Andrus revealed that he's 91 years old and has lived in Albany since moving there in 1928 from Wyoming -- "just over the hill." He graduated from Albany College in 1938 and then went to work at U. S. Bank, from which he retired in 1979. His filmmaking came to the attention of Tyler when he and his colleagues in the Archipelago film collective made a documentary about George's brother, Jerry, a magician and inventor. As George revealed, "Dancing Rainbows" (you can see images and buy a DVD here) is his only film. And he was genuinely touched and surprised to be recognized for it in such a way and place.

They may have a big festival coming up in Cannes in a couple weeks. But I don't think there will be anything in the South of France quite like what went on in the Northeast of Portland the other night. If you missed it, you missed something. And maybe next year you'll finally take my advice and catch one of these once-in-a-lifetime shows."