EFF PORTLAND WINDS DOWN WITH CHARISMATIC MEGAFAUNA & MORE

EFF Portland is already nearing the end of its first year's run.  If you still haven't made it out to this year's festival, there's still plenty of stuff to see.  This evening, there's a two-part presentation of shorts going under the name The Upper Crust (part one's at 6pm, here's a link to part two, which begins at 8pm) and more (live performances, a premiere of work by Evan Meaney at 3pm, etc.).

Tomorrow night marks the official end of the festival.  And the good folks at EFF Portland have put together two enticing events to bring it all to a close.  Sunday afternoon at 1pm, the Clinton Street Theater hosts The Dill Pickle Club's latest installment in their ongoing lecture series, A Place Called Home: Lectures on Filmmaking in Portland.  For this month's edition, the D.P.C.'s rounded up local filmmakers Jim Blashfield, Brooke Jacobson and Matt McCormick (a piece on his most recent film was recently featured on the blog here) to talk about their craft and its relationship to place.

The official festival closing spot is occupied by the Portland premiere of Vanessa Renwick's  Charismatic Megafauna at the Hollywood Theatre.  Via e-mail, Renwick communicated that Charismatic Megafauna is the third piece she's made on the topic of wolf reintroduction (this installation piece being one of the others), part of a twelve year process of making a larger work on the topic.  The event will feature a live score performed by Lori Goldston, Jessika Kenney, Dylan Carlson and Greg Campbell.

Here's a snippet from the press release:
Portland Oregon-based radical documentary film maker Vanessa Renwick places 16mm film footage from her own teenage life in inner city Chicago, living with a wolf dog with stunning video documentation shot by biologists reintroducing wolves into the western USA in the late 90’s. We watch the wolf dog scavenging in the gutters of Chicago, and we watch humans performing the act known perversely as “wildlife management” on wolves.


The evening will also feature a rare screening of Renwick’s “Mighty Tacoma.”

Sound and Vision & EFF Portland present Charismatic Megafauna on Sunday, May 27th at the Hollywood Theatre.  More info on the program available here.  More info EFF Portland's showcases, tickets, venues and special events available here.


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CINEMA PROJECT & EFF PORTLAND present THE ANIMALS & THEIR LIMITATIONS: FILMS BY JIM TRAINOR

Cinema Project joins forces this week with the premiere edition of EFF Portland (more coverage of the fest here) to present the animated films of Jim Trainor.  Trainor, who once received the mixed blessing of being shit on by the Mercury; an honor that was later re-examined by an article in the Art Institute of Chicago's student publication where Trainor questioned some people's ability to "get" the work, creates his films mostly with pen and ink on paper, which he then captures on 16mm. 

Tomorrow night's event includes seven of Trainor's idiosyncratic films.  For more on the program, here's the Cinema Project press release:

Since the harmony of nature is actually based on an unhappy system of things destroying other things, I am continually struck and amused by nature documentaries' almost compulsive tendency to try to comfort us instead of leaving us stranded in existential horror, where we belong. —Jim Trainor 

As part of the first-ever Experimental Film Festival Portland, Grand Detour and Cinema Project are pleased to present Chicago filmmaker Jim Trainor. Trainor's strange animation takes the traditional set-up of science and anthropological films and turns it on its head, giving the power of narration to the animals and the headhunters themselves. "I killed my identical twin sister, " a hyena confesses in Harmony. "I killed my sister. But then since I am only an animal, I kept looking for her everywhere." In Magic Kingdom, live-action shots of animals in the zoo are interspersed with the ever-pres­ent animated dots that act as tender representations of the pulse of living beings. Working almost exclusively on 16mm, Trainor often starts out simply with Sharpie and white paper. Perfection is not the point, instead the films purposefully quiver, underlining the subject matter's dark humor.

And here's the lineup of films:


The Presentation Theme [2008, 16mm, b&w, sound, 14min.] 
The Bats [1998, 16mm, color, sound, 8 min.] 
The Moschops pt. I [2000, 16mm, b&w, sound, 6 min.] 
The Moschops pt. II [2000, 16mm, b&w, sound, 6 min.] 
The Skulls and the Skulls and the Bones and the Bones [2003, video, color, sound, 13 min.] 
Harmony [2005, 16mm, color, sound, 13 min.] 
The Magic Kingdom [2002, 16mm, color, sound, 7 min.]

Cinema Project & EFF Portland present The Animals and Their Limitations on Thursday, May 24th.  More info on the program available here.  More info EFF Portland's showcases, tickets, venues and special events available here.


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EFF PORTLAND TINKERS WITH THE PDX FESTIVAL SCENE

I've been really excited about the emergence of EFF Portland ever since the first murmurings about it began popping up in my Facebook feed.  There's been a hollow space in the Portland's film festival circuit ever since the PDX Film Festival quietly exited the scene.  So, the idea of a new experimental fest coming to the rescue was more than welcome.  And from the films that I've seen thus far, the first edition of EFF Portland is a well-curated, diverse, and exciting mix of classically and bleeding edge experimental films, pushing the boundaries of the cinematic experience.

I'll be writing a bit more later in the week about a special event or two at EFF Portland but, for now, here are a few recommended films to catch:

New Hippie Future (dir. Dalibor Barić), screening as part of the "Mycology" presentation on Thurs., May 24th at 9pm:
A kaleidoscopic experience of constantly shifting images and textures, set to a driving Krautrockesque soundtrack.  A beautiful piece; you'll want to see it again as soon as it's over.

Chris Freeman presents: A Scene from Star Trek: The Next Generation, Episode 3X09, "The Vengeance Factor" (dir. Chris Freeman), screening as part of the "Near Side" presentation on Fri., May 25th at 8:45pm:
Freeman moves the context of a piece of pop culture into an entirely different place.  Humor and insight coexist here; it questions as much as it amuses.

 Jazzy Birds (dir. Jeremy Rourke), screening as part of the "Eruption" presentation on Wed., May 23rd at 7pm:
A sweet blending of stop-motion involving cutouts, illustrations, superimposed imagery, etc., all set to a lovely little song that shares the title of the film.

Wrestling With My Father (dir. Charles Fairbanks), screening as a part of the "Upper Crust, part two" presentation on Sat., May 26th at 8pm:
Fairbanks' camera observes his father at a wrestling match.  It's such a flimsy idea that it shouldn't really work but, somehow, a hypnotic effect is forged.

Dark Enough (dir. Jeanne Liotta), screening as a part of the "Magma Flow" presentation on Sat., May 26th at 1pm:
I've been a big fan of Liotta's work, ever since screening her Observando El Cielo in a film class a few years back.  This piece is based in an experiment with text and image, working in collaboration with the poet Lisa Gill.






EFF Portland runs through Sunday, May 27th.  More info on showcases, tickets, venues and special events available here.


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