Luke Cage and Prescott Sheng, Crock: The Motion Picture
09/05/09 4:30 p.m.
posted by: Allison Halter
We all know that Portland is a small city. It is the reason that so many of us choose to live here. As a relative newcomer to this place, I am interested in the mythology that surrounds Portland, particularly what makes this city any sort of “go-to” destination. I had hoped that Crock would give me some answers, or at the very least some context clues. It is described, after all, as being the brainchild of and starring “artists and musicians from Portland’s 90s indie scene.” Perhaps this is a bit much to expect, but what better way to understand a city than through the art it produces?
Although this screening was billed as being shown with directors’ commentary, at the start of the screening the directors announced that there would be no such thing; they felt that the film could stand well enough on its own. Unfortunately, this proved not to be the case for me. Though it wasn’t exactly terrible, it felt like it was entirely a private joke, being screened for the benefit of the former cast members in attendance. The sound quality was bad enough that most of the dialogue was indecipherable, making the already vague plot even more nebulous. I don’t mind having to ask “Why am I looking at/watching/experiencing this?” and sometimes not having an answer. However, when even the performers don’t seem to care about what they are doing, my patience for the indecipherable quickly runs out. During Crock, I felt that I was in the unlucky position of having to endure something that gave me almost nothing to latch onto, no in on the joke, and so, in the end, I left early.
I think the thing about the film standing on its own was meant as a joke – I heard there were audio issues that made simultaneous commentary too difficult. There was some commentary and Q&A at the end, which mainly reflected the directors’ sheepishness about the film being shown at such a distance from its original context. Despite the directors’ self-deprecation and the movie’s obvious technical flaws, I think Crock is an interesting time-capsule of the creative philosophies that made the Pacific NW such a vital place in the 90s – in particular the DIY, communitarian ethos that is sometimes more about the artmaking process than about the end result (except insofar as the result memorializes the process). I think the references to May ’68 underscore the exuberant, in-your-face attitude that makes this movie borderline unwatchable, but also pretty great.
I attended for similar reasons, and I was not disappointed. The movie made mythologizing a lot harder to do, and that’s great. I loved the iron fist. It was awesome, and pretty much wrong, I mean not an iron fist at all, but what a find! The whole movie seemed like that.
A few years ago I went to Cinema Project’s screening of Peter Watkins’s LA COMMUNE (PARIS 1871). It’s an 8-hour movie made by Watkins and a group of Parisians who live in or near the NE Paris neighborhoods of the 1871 Commune. They hang out in a studio enacting various scenes from the history of the commune. Every now and then they also talk to each other about their lives in Paris and the process of making the movie. Like CROCK there’s no real acting; it’s often private-seeming or inscrutable; it seems indifferent to the audience and is boring for long stretches. But it’s clear these people are making what they can from what they’ve been given, and it means something to them.
With both CROCK and LA COMMUNE I was engaged and moved by the undisguised plainness and flaws of both the people and the project. Anyone looking for mythology got a cold shower of human failure. I think that’s important. It means more to me than seeing any kind of artistic triumph or struggle. I thought CROCK’s cheapness, it’s confused ideas, corny, lopsided, lurching plot, and self-delusions were real and probably a lot like my own. LA COMMUNE benefits from the shadow of real histories that many of us know and care about (Paris 1871, 1968, and 2001), but I’m ready to start looking at the histories closer to home. All the better of they don’t get mythologized.