Preview:
What: The Best of Portland's 30th Northwest Film & Video Festival; hosted by Missoula Art Museum.
When: 7 p.m. Thursday.
Cost: $6 ($5 for Missoula Art Museum members).
Every year since 1973, the Northwest Film Center of Portland, Ore., has held a festival to celebrate film and video made by artists in Alaska, British Columbia, Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington. Now entering its third decade, the Northwest Film and Video Festival has come to serve as a bellwether of the vitality of independent filmmaking in our nascent regional industry.
So where does filmmaking in the Northwest stand? Judging from the "Best of the 30th Northwest Film & Video Festival," to be screened tonight, Thursday, Nov. 11, the answer is: all over the map.
In just 90 minutes, the 11 Best-of selections range from surreal comedy to moody character study, from abstract eye-candy to earnest documentary. While it's unlikely that every viewer will love every one of the films, it's easy enough to get past the selections that sag. After all, the longest film in the group is just 16 1/2 minutes long.
The night begins with "A Man and His Pants," a 3 1/2 minute film built out of a single, short pratfall: a man loses his balance while trying to put on a pair of pants, and knocks over a stack of books. After showing the clip in its entirety (a few too many times), filmmaker Christopher Tenzis begins rolling the clip forward and backward rhythmically, transforming short segments of the audio track into what sounds like drum beats.
The whole thing transforms into a kind of glitch-noise drum solo, with the titular character "dancing" maniacally through his pratfall. Who knew that such a klutz like that could dance like that?
Next up is "49?," a film that attempts to answer the question, "what is an Indian 49?" At the outset, narrator Gene Tagaban admits, "I don't even know myself, and I'm an Indian." Tagaban, who is of Cherokee, Tlingit and Filipino ancestry, doesn't ever entirely answer the question in the six-minute film; but what he does accomplish is an entertaining, personal sketch of what these ceremonial songs mean to him.
Matt McCormick's lighthearted "American Nutria" is in ways the most peculiar inclusion in the bunch. It is a short documentary, reminiscent of the classic "Cane Toads," in which McCormick chronicles the strange history of the nutria, a large rodent transplanted from Argentina to the southern United States during the 1940s.
Although the film includes footage both funny and disturbing, it ultimately fails to explicate one of its most basic premises - that nutria have been falsely blamed and persecuted for environmental damage in Louisiana - and ends with a clunky personification of the creatures, positing that, "perhaps as they chew on roots, the nutria dream of Argentina, of long lost family and distant friends, and wonder what would it be like to live in a swamp that they could call home." Oooookay.
Melisa McGregor's short film, "Fast Forward," ponders nothing so heavy, instead relying on a cleverly twisted premise and snappy timing to create a funny short film about a fleeting love triangle. There's a breakup, a chase, a chance meeting that turns into false intimacy, a confrontation of old enemies, and ultimately a make-up. Given that it all happens in nine minutes, the title of the film seems quite apt.
Next comes "Why the Anderson Children Didn't Come to Dinner," by far the most bizarre, carefully characterized, and sumptuously visualized film of the bunch. It's sort of like "The Royal Tenenbaums" crossed with "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover." A one-sentence plot summary might read: "Three whimsical young siblings escape from mother's culinary abuses by fleeing into their fantasies." The longest of the films included in the best-of revue, "Why the Anderson Children Didn't Come to Dinner" is as beautiful as it is laugh-out-loud funny.
You know that bumper-sticker that says "Visualize Whirled Peas"? Well, filmmaker Rob Tyler apparently decided to do just that. The result, "Blender: Rotation Test 1-3," is a short film that might best be understood as a series of moving still-lifes, in which frozen fruits and vegetables are stuck in a blender and filmed.
Sound mundane? Well, it is. But it's also surprisingly compelling visually, thanks to Tyler's sense of geometry and texture. In any event, it's mercifully short.
Nick Peterson's "Three" had better be visually compelling as well, since it is essentially a silent movie. The film follows two characters - by inference a mother and daughter - as they attempt to connect with each other and the world around them. The two lead actresses are wonderfully cast: Both manage to speak volumes without saying a word.
Although it would be hard to argue that the film offers much in the way of plot, the sequence of action does manage to depict that a relationship that is both strained and improving.
"Transgenic Romance" offers nothing in the way of plausible fiction, visual beauty, or magical revelation. Instead, it takes one of the more bizarre science headlines of the past decade - the successful introduction of jellyfish genes into the embryo of a rhesus monkey at a research facility Oregon - and posits the illogical question: What kind of love letters might a monkey and a jellyfish write to each other?
The answer - or, at least, filmmaker Morgan Currie's answer - is the meat of this film.
"Today I am a mindless wreck floating into algae and digesting microscopic shrimp by the armfuls," pines the jellyfish, as black-and-white stock footage of a jellyfish rolls on screen. You get the picture.
Trying to describe any one of the pictures in Bruce Alcock's "Wrong Message Phone Number" would require more words than this newspaper prints in a week. Drawing inspiration from an angry phone message mistakenly left on the wrong answering machine, Alcock created a dense, multi-layered collage animation of the story sketched out by the caller.
The result is sort of like the video to Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" Š except better.
By contrast, "Entry" is a film realized in starkly simplistic visual language: woman walks down sidewalk, dances a little ditty, walks away.
Produced by acclaimed Seattle dance company 33 Fainting Spells, this film hardly does justice to the company's reputation. It feels much longer than it actually is - which can't be a good thing (especially since the film only runs five minutes).
Ditto "Meridian Days," the last of the films in the Best-of set. Self-consciously arty and ultimately unresolved, this film might best be appreciated as pure visual imagery rather than the character study that it apparently intends to be. There are plenty of striking individual images, but little to tie them together beyond a sense of detachment from the film's subject and setting.
Regardless of whether this last film connects with viewers, it's a bummer of a way to wrap up the evening, leaving a taste of bitterness on the tongue. Too bad: That's not the fullest or best flavor of the offerings that comprise the northwest's film- and video-making scene.
But don't judge a dinner solely by its dessert: The Best of the 30th Northwest Film & Video Festival is a feast worth savoring.
Reach Joe Nickell at 523-2358 or jnickell@missoulian.com.
|
 |
 |
Add your comment now! Write your comment in the form below.
(Email address is for verification only. If you'd like to email a story, look for the link above)