The Spaces In–Between—Short Cuts V at PIFF!

February 23
[Northwest Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium | 1:00pm]
co-Presented with the Northwest Film Center

Cinema Project is pleased to once again present a program of films for the Portland International Film Festival. In Cabinet, by Robert Todd, Appearing: Mechanisms of inside, the life of air outside. three hours, fifteen minutes before the hurricane struck by Christina Battle wasinspired by the diorama-like boxes of Joseph Cornell, and with text taken from victims of hurricane Katrina, imagines moments just before a violent weather storm. Camp Series #2 by John Price is a Thanksgiving weekend with the family at a duck hunting camp on the Ottawa River. Observando el Cielo by Jeanne Liotta is seven years of celestial field recordings gathered from the chaos of the cosmos and inscribed onto 16mm film from various locations upon this turning tripod Earth. How to Conduct a Love Affair by David Gatten is a Valentine and this is a fragment: for the one who mends my rips; from the next installment of the Byrd project Secret History of the Dividing Line, a True Account in Nine Parts. The Butterfly in Winter by Ute Aurand & Maria Lang is an intimate portrait of Marie Lang’s 97 year old mother as filmed by Ute Aurand.

February 23
Cabinet by Robert Todd [ USA, 2007, 16mm, color/b&w, sound, 9 min.]
three hours, fifteen minutes before the hurricane struck by Christina Battle [2006, 35mm, b&w, silent, 5 min.]
Camp Series #2 by John Price [Canada, 35mm, b&w, silent, 7 min.]
Observando el Cielo by Jeanne Liotta [USA, 2007, 16mm, color, sound, 19 min.]
How to Conduct a Love Affair by David Gatten [USA, 2007, 16mm, color/b&w, silent, 8 min.]
The Butterfly in Winter by Ute Aurand & Maria Lang [Germany, 2006, 16mm, color, sound, 30 min.]

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MYSTERIOUS OBJECT—
THE Short Films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul

April 1 + 2 [Northwest Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium | 7:30pm]
co-Presented with the Northwest Film Center

Cinema Project and The Northwest Film Center are delighted to present two programs of short film and video by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, one of the most radically original young filmmakers in contemporary world cinema. Best known by American audiences for his feature-length films, he has been simultaneously producing a body of short work influenced by avant-garde traditions which inventively mix narrative and documentary modes.

"These two programmes begin with the contagiously joyful The Anthem, a bizarre, bewildering recasting of the Thai National Anthem, which is customarily played before film screenings in Thailand. All of Weerasethakul’s signature trademarks are here: a quiet, suffused humanism, meticulous compositions, effortless fluidity, and a boundless exuberance and mystery that bespeak a kind of transcendence. The films that follow evince the director’s main themes, ranging from the nature of filmmaking itself (Like the Relentless Fury of the Pounding Waves and Worldly Desires—a commission by the Jeonju International Film Festival); to cultural commentary on Western perceptions of Thailand (Malee and the Boy, Thirdworld), and the complexities of memory (0116643225059, My Mother's Garden)."– Andréa Picard

April 1
The Anthem [2006, 35mm, 5 min]
Windows [1999, video, 17 min]
Malee and the Boy [1999, video, 27 min]
Like the Relentless Fury of the Pounding Waves [1995, video, 30 min]
Thirdworld [1997, video, 17 min]

April 2
The Anthem [2006, 35mm, 5 min]
0116643225059 [1994, video, 5 min]
Ghost of Asia [2005, video, 9 min]
My Mother's Garden [2007, video, 7 min]
Worldly Desires [2005, video, 40 min]
Emereld [2007, video, 12 min]

Special thanks to Jed Rapfogel of Anthology Film Archives

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The Adventures of the Exquisite Corpse—
Two Films by Andrew noren
April 28 +29 [New American Art Union at 7:30pm]

Andrew Noren has been making avant-garde films since the mid-1960s. Since 1968 he has been working on a multi-part diary film entitled The Adventures of the Exquisite Corpse. Rarely screened, Noren's accomplished films are some of the finest examples of the transformative and abstract qualities of black-and-white film. His works are astonishing meditations on the essence of film that capture with reverie the simple beauty of domestic scenes. A master of light and shadow, fragmentation and speed, Noren dazzles the eye and offers a transcendent view of reality. Noted author Scott MacDonald: "Increasingly, Noren's interest is light itself, as it is manipulated by camera and filmmaker. If one thinks of the movie camera as an instrument with which a filmmaker can compose and perform visual music, Noren may well be the most accomplished visual master musician we have." In Charmed Particles Noren's alchemy of light and living, it is the light that has become "real and the flesh illusory." The film frames become living cells containing high-energy particles of life that only coincidentally reveal the outlines of the human figures generated from them. The Lighted Field Noren states is "Ghost pictures from the 'other' world, which is this world. The ghost is in love, at work, at play with bright companions in The Lighted Field. Flutter of phantoms, trick of light, sleight of the eye. A comedy of mirrors. Love advice from the grave."

April 28
The Adventures of the Exquisite Corpse Part IV: Charmed Particles
[1977, 16mm, b&w, silent (18fps), 78 min]

April 29
The Adventures of the Exquisite Corpse Part V: The Lighted Field
[1987, 16mm, b&w, silent, 61 min]

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Total power—Films and Videos by Stephanie Barber

May 3 [hollywood theatre at 5:30pm]
co-Presented with the PDX Experimental Festival

Stephanie Barber joins us from Baltimore to present a selection of her meticulously crafted, odd and imaginative films and videos. Beginning with her studies at Binghamton under filmmaker Larry Gottheim, Stephanie has gone on to complete over thirty original works, mostly on 16mm, that successfully combine elements of formalism, tragedy and humor. Her work has been featured in the New York Film Festival's Views From the Avant-Garde and the Museum of Modern Art to name a few. Stephanie will screen a selection of her work including total power dead dead "is thinking of war and impressionism, death and love… is again at war and wonders at your sincerity. And is perverse." Catalog contains a group of shots where live people stand silent, reenacting still photos Barber has found. Dogs features two paper machee dogs contemplating the universe and their existence, playing with the entire notion of innocent wonder vs. academic pretentiousness. Shipfilm, "probably the most heartbreaking film I have made," was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art's American Century: Part II 1950-2000. In addition, Stephanie will also be presenting her two newest video works. Dwarfs the sea which involves small biographies and musing generalizations--men’s relations to each other and their lives. In a tiger and an island deer, wolf, lecturer--woodcut, evolution and Elvis are interwoven with shots of an audience whose virgil-like role leads the viewer to respond to the disparate images as simply "spectacle".

—ARTIST IN ATTENDANCE—

May 3
flower, the boy, the librarian [1996, 16mm, color/b&w, sound, 6 min]
catalog [2005, 16 mm, color, sound, 11 min]
total power, dead dead dead [2005, 16mm, color, sound, 3 min]
dwarfs the sea [2007, video, b&w, sound, 7 min]
a tiger and an island [2007, video, color, sound, 6 min]
dogs [2000, 16mm, color, sound, 15 min]
they invented machines [1997, 16mm, color, sound, 7 min]
letters, notes [1997, 16mm, color, silent, 6 min]
shipfilm [1998, 16mm, b&w, silent, 3 min]
a little present (for my friend columbus the explorer) [1997, 16mm, sound, 3 min]
metronome [1998, 16mm, color, sound, 10 min]

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Jess

May 16 [podkrepa hall at 7:30pm]
underwritten by the cooley memorial art gallery
in Conjunction with The Cooley Memorial Art Gallery’s Exhibit Jess: To and From the Printed Page
co-Presented with the backroom and the cooley memorial art gallery ]

Jess [1923—2004], was an influential artist who emerged in the 1950s from within the literary context of Beat culture in San Francisco. Jess collaborated extensively with filmmakers, poets, artists, and writers of the time including his partner Robert Duncan, Micheal McClure, Wallace Berman and Harry Jacobus. Jess gradually evolved his own style of enigmatic figurative painting, making what he called "translations," lushly painted recomposed images borrowed from children's books and old science texts. This program brings together films that were either directly or indirectly inspired by Jess. The film In Between by Stan Brakhage, with music by John Cage, is a portrait Brakhage made of Jess, "a daydream nightmare in the surrealist tradition." Bay Area legend filmmaker Larry Jordan collaborated with Jess on The 40 and 1 Nights (or Jess' Didactic Nickelodeon) Jess performs 41 (now lost) collages to (his) selected sound bits in the manner of a turn-of-the-century nickelodeon. Jordan collaborated with poet Micheal McClure on Visions of the City, a portrait of both McClure and San Francisco in 1957. Jane Conger Belson Shimane and her then husband Jordan Belson, were also deeply involved in the 1950s in San Francisco. Odds & Ends is a collage film combining paintings, out takes of travelogues, animation, live action Television, along with a tongue in cheek narration about jazz and poetry in the beat fashion. Odds & Ends is cut-out animation scored by Henry Jacobs.Christopher Maclaine, was active in the early beatnik scene of North Beach in the 1940s and 1950s, as one of the authentic characters at the very emergence of the beat movement on the West Coast. The Man Who Invented Gold is MacClaine's masterpiece about a madman's alchemical quest for gold, while Beat captures the existential angst and futility of bohemian life. Wallace Berman's film, Aleph, has been described by Brakhage as "the only true envisionment of the sixties I know."

May 16
In Between by Stan Brakhage [1955, 16mm, color, sound, 10 min]
The 40 and 1 Nights (or Jess' Didactic Nickelodeon) by Larry Jordan
[1961, 16mm color, sound, 6 min]
Logos by Jane Conger Belson Shimane [1957, 16mm, color, sound, 2 min]
Odds & Ends by Jane Conger Belson Shimane [1957, 16mm, color, sound, 5 min]
The Man Who Invented Gold by Christopher Maclaine [1957, b&w/color, 14 min]
Aleph by Wallace Berman [1958-1976, 16mm, color, silent, 10 min]
Visions of a City by Larry Jordan [1957-1978, 16mm, sepia, sound, 8 min]
Beat by Cristopher Maclaine [1958,16mm, color, sound, 6 min]

For Information on advanced tickets for this night of Film, Dinner, and Music, please contact: www.thebackroompdx.com

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Excavations of Mexico

May 20 + 21 [Northwest Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium at 7:30pm]
co-Presented with the Northwest Film Center
please note these dates differ from our printed calendar!!

These two programs bring together the experimental documentaries of Los Angeles-based professor/writer/curator Jesse Lerner, whose films often mix original material with found imagery and sounds, and related rarities from the archives of Lerner's production company The American Egypt. The films reflect on Mexico, its image abroad, its troubled relationship with the United States, and the pre-Columbian civilizations that thrived in Mesoamerica before the Spanish Conquest. Sunday Afternoon in the Valley of Mexico is a nationalist spectacle staged in a stadium and the pretext for this propagandistic tribute to an emergent Mexican modernity. Natives provides both an investigation and critique of the anti-immigration and "Nativist" movements along the US-Mexico border. Home Movies documents a North American family's travels by rail through Mexico. Magueyes by Ruben Gamez animates that icon of mexicanidad, the agave, by sending the plants off to a civil war. Lerner's newest work, Magnavoz, is an experimental adaptation on Xavier Icaza's speculative rant on the future of post-revolutionary Mexico. Bringing together noisy broadcasts from atop the volcanoes, raucous bacchanalia at popular watering holes and a series of apocalyptic, hypernationalistic pronouncements, the meditation is timely and prescient, though it was written more than eighty years ago. Ruins examines counterfeiting in relation to the appropriation of Mexican culture and how the rarefaction of this process recontextualizes archeological objects as art. At the center of Ruins is Brigido Lara, a master forger whose "Pre-Columbian" objects have been displayed in major (and unwitting) museums throughout the US and Europe.

—artist in attendance—

may 20
Sunday Afternoon in the Valley of Mexico
by Garrison Films [1940s, 16mm, b&w, sound, 10 min]
Natives by Jesse Lerner and Scott Sterling [1991, 16mm, b&w, sound, 26 min.]
Home movies [1940s, 16mm, color, silent, 10 min]
Magueyes by Rueben Gamez [1962, 35mm, b&w, sound, 8 min]
Magnavoz by Jesse Lerner [2007, 16mm, b&w, sound, 25 min]

may 21
Indians of Mexico [1930s, 16mm, b&w, silent, 10 min]
Ruins by Jesse Lerner [1999, 16mm, b&w, sound, 77 min]

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in the street—outdoor film screening

June 14
City Repair Temple 3125 NE Burnside [Across the street from Music Millinieum]
Live music by DASH! at 8:30 pm
Films start at dusk [around 9:15 pm]

Once again, Cinema Project ventures out beneath the Portland stars with our film projector and screen with an eclectic program. Artist and filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt spent a lifetime capturing the world around him in an improvised, highly personal style. Among his most beautiful studies is this simple portrait of children swimming Under the Brooklyn Bridge. Noted New York City photographer Helen Levitt collaborated with Janice Loeb and James Agee on In the Street, capturing children at play on the streets of Manhattan's Upper East Side. Portland native and musicologist, painter, filmmaker, linguist, and anthropologist Harry Smith created Mirror Animation – a series of complexly intricate, hand-drawn collage animations. In his masterpiece The Riddle of Lumen by the prolific Stan Brakhage, the hero of the film is light itself. Finally concluding the night is The Black Tower by John Smith, we enter the world of a man haunted by a tower which, he believes, is following him around London.

june 14
Under The Brooklyn Bridge by Rudy Burckhardt [1953, 16mm, b&w, 15 min]
In the Street by Helen Levitt [1952, 16mm, b&w, sound, 16 min]
Mirror Animation by Harry E. Smith [1979, 16mm, color, sound, 11 min]
The Riddle of Lumen by Stan Brakhage [1972, 16mm, color, silent, 17 min]
The Black Tower by John Smith [1987, 16mm, color, sound, 24 min]

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