PERIPHERAL PRODUCE SHOWS THE KIDS HOW IT'S DONE

Those in attendance at this year's first installment of EFF Portland no doubt heard a lot of conversation about Portland's past as a mecca for experimental film.  To a certain extent, the mission statement of the new festival centered around rebooting that legacy.  One could easily point out the loose collective of video and film artists known as Peripheral Produce as being one of the touchstones of Portland's experimental past.  From the mid-90s through the first decade of the new millennium, the film collective dipped their paws into exhibition, distribution and, perhaps most influentially, began a local festival (PDX Fest) for highlighting experimental fare.

This Saturday night Peripheral Produce rises from the ashes to celebrate the re-release of their 1996 video compilation the Auto-Cinematic Video Mix Tape.  Collective organizer Matt McCormick has cobbled together a showcase of new and old experimental work for the evening's entertainment, replicating the feel of the collective's legendary experimental film nights.  Audiences can expect to see works by McCormick, Miranda July, Vanessa Renwick, Andy Blubaugh, Ashby Lee Collinson, Orland Nutt, Rob Tyler and many more.

Consider it a forum of sorts between the wizened elder statesmen (okay, statespeople...this is the 21st century, after all) and the new school of underground film kids.  By all means, take notes, folks...this is how it's done.

Let's all take a moment to gaze upon an excerpt from the press release:

The August 4th show will feature seminal Portland works along with a selection of new works from Portland’s fast rising “next generation” of experimental filmmakers. The show and DVD features acclaimed artist and filmmaker Miranda July’s 1996 video Atlanta. Atlanta was July’s first significant video piece, and shows the makings of her sharp sense of humor and attention to detail found in her later blockbuster works (Me and You and Everyone We Know, The Future). 

The show and DVD also include writer/filmmaker Jon Raymond’s 1997 piece Battles on the Astral Plane, a clever mocking of the popular Mortal Kombat video game that shows Raymond’s crafty, self-effacing wit that can still be found in his books and screenplays (Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff, Livability). Vanessa Renwick, Chel White, Rob Tyler and Matt McCormick also offer works from early in their career. 

Also included in the program is new works from NW Film Festival winner Orland Nutt and TBA darling Ashley Lee Collinson, as well as work from Stephen Slappe, Andrew Blubaugh, Ben Popp, Jim Blashfield, and many others.

The Peripheral Produce manifesto

the subconscious art of graffiti removal (excerpt) from matt mccormick on Vimeo.


Peripheral Produce's dvd release party for the Auto-Cinematic Video Mix Tape happens at the Hollywood Theatre on Saturday, August 4th at 8pm.  More info available here.


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Best of 2011 -->> eleven through fifteen

#15 Another Year (dir. Mike Leigh):

The small victories of an aging English couple are contrasted against the miserable lives of their friends.  It isn't that Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen) have everything; their successes are modest: occupations that feed them intellectually and spiritually, the emotional support of each other, and a adult son whose company they enjoy.  But placed against Mary's (Lesley Manville) complete inability to navigate the daily grind, theirs are lives that work.

A true actor's piece where everyone completely inhabits their roles.  This may be my favorite Mike Leigh film since Life is Sweet.

#14 Tabloid (dir. Errol Morris):

Errol Morris returns to the valley of the freaks with this one.  The film relays the exploits of Joyce McKinney, a woman who, after being dumped, assumed her boyfriend had been brainwashed by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.  So, what's a girl to do?  Allegedly, Joyce's solution was to kidnap, drug and rape the man out of his religious convictions.
Morris is a master documentary filmmaker; one of our best.  Here he plays both sides of the story, letting Joyce, her accusers and those caught in the fray the opportunity to tell their version of the truth. 

#13 Into the Abyss (dir. Werner Herzog):

An admission: during first 15 minutes or so, I was disappointed that this film features none of Herzog's characteristically downcast narration. This, however, was before I understood what he was trying to craft here.  Simply put, this documentary is Herzog's most mature work to date.  Accordingly,  he keeps himself (mostly) out of the picture, choosing instead to focus on the story of a triple homicide and the people involved.

Herzog's version of Texas is one where everyone has experienced loss, often violently, leading us to believe that the central crime of the narrative is just a more heightened version of business as usual. Of course, post-screening, one must square the facts presented with Herzog's own notion of ecstatic truth, at which point the portrait of Texas does become questionable, as does the sequence where Herzog shows us the bullet-ridden cars that "testify" to various acts of violence. But the impact of the film remains.

#12 Senna (dir. Asif Kapadia):


The simultaneously thrilling and tragic tale of Aryton Senna, the best Formula One racing driver of his generation, is told almost entirely through frenetically-charged, archival materials. As such, it is a documentary of pure immediacy, a historical portrait that plays out in the present tense most of the time. A tension-filled masterpiece capable of captivating even viewers who know nothing (or care nothing) of the sport that its subject dominated.

#11 Meek's Cutoff (dir. Kelly Reichardt):

Kelly Reichardt's third collaboration with screenwriter Jon Raymond finds the duo moving even further away from explanatory exposition than in their previous films. Meek's Cutoff is more about what is left unspoken.
Hit the link to read what I had to say about it in March.
 

 

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MEEK'S CUTOFF: THE PROBLEMS OF TODAY, DRESSED UP IN YESTERDAY'S CLOTHES

A cocksure false prophet leads a band of unfortunates through a dry and desolate wasteland.  A child reads aloud from the Old Testament.  And the one person with the potential to serve as a messianic figure is hogtied and treated to the constant suspicions of his captors.  Welcome to the western as reconceived by Kelly Reichardt, whose previous efforts earned her a seat at the head of A.O. Scott's "neo-neo realists" of American cinema table.

In her latest film, Meek's Cutoff, the director brings her now familiar strategies to bear upon the Oregon trail and the historic failure that was Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood), a trail guide whose bad advice leaves those travelers foolish enough to follow him stranded without water as they move across the desert landscape of eastern Oregon.  Whereas the objectively pitched camerawork in Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy and Old Joy often lent those films a sense that we were intimately accessing the singular consciousness of each film's protagonist, here we're placed at a distance from each member of the group, helplessly watching as the terrible yet oddly muted events transpire.

If there's any one character to hang our sympathies upon, it's Emily (Michelle Williams) who, despite being equally as miserable as her fellow travelers, at least defines herself through a selfless act of humanity, performed at the lowest point in their journey.  Beyond that moment, we're denied insight into these characters, asked instead as an audience to observe and consider our own responses to such circumstances while dwelling upon what behaviors have changed over time and which of those have remained doggedly present in the culture of today.

Whether it's the insanity of groupthink, the tendency to devalue natural resources until they reach the point of scarcity or the assumptions caught up in patriarchal dominance, the problems facing these characters are not unlike the ones we face during our day to day lives.  Which makes total sense, since period pieces are more often than not positioned to speak to contemporary issues, rather than poised purely as a means of reflecting upon the past.  Reichardt has proven herself over the course of just a few films to be a director deeply interested in the undercurrents of her stories, favoring the cultivation of subtext rather than a routine focus on plot points.  Old Joy, for instance, is just as much about the rise of partisanship during the post-9-11 Bush era as it is, on a surface level, about a friendship strained by differing ideologies.

As the characters in Meek's Cutoff move aimlessly through the Oregon wilderness, it's difficult not to view the landscape as a metaphorical space in which a perennial struggle is being reenacted.  And, yes, sometimes a wagon train is just a wagon train.  But, in the case of Meek's Cutoff, I'll hazard a guess that there's something deeper lurking right below the surface of this tale.

Meek's Cutoff opens in mid-April in select cities.  Given it's home-grown heritage, expect it to play locally at that time in PDX.



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