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However relentlessly familiar it becomes to Portlanders, one narrative never gets less frustrating: The city is changing, and creative people can’t afford to spend a lot of time—13½ years in Cinema Project’s case—doing shit for free.
Whether abstract explorations of color theory, rarely seen interviews with revolutionary civil rights leaders or documentary shorts of kids in small-town Texas (to name three examples from this season), since 2004 experimental film collective Cinema Project has been bringing high-minded film to Portland cinemagoers in its original formats. Sadly, it’s time to say goodbye to this prized institution. After its upcoming final screening this Thursday, Cinema Project’s regular programming will be put on hold indefinitely.
But when board member Mia Ferm talks about the project’s final season coming to a close, she doesn’t mention an absolute ending. “We’ll hang on to our nonprofit [status] and our equipment,” she says, with the eventual, unhurried goal of restarting the project someday. “It could be in a year, or it could be never. We don’t know.”
That said, this final screening is not to be missed. Titled Abstraction, Difference and Presence, the one-night-only program features work by contemporary Canadian filmmaker Jean-Paul Kelly, which, Ferm says, “is really about examining what might be called the documentary code of ethics: thinking about the visual structures and editorial structures that inform how we make documentaries, and that slippery slope between objective and subjective filmmaking.”
In many cases, Kelly draws on images viewers might recognize, further obscuring their own sense of truth and reliability of memory. One strong example is Service of the Goods, an arresting 25 minutes that re-create, shot by shot, scenes from films by seminal documentarian Frederick Wiseman (La Danse, High School, Hospital, Welfare).
With the shuttering of Cinema Project, Portland stands to lose a legacy of more than 100 visiting filmmakers and 10 to 14 relevant, thoughtfully curated programs like this one each year. Thankfully, other programmers are taking the reins. The Portland International Film Festival featured an avant-garde section for the first time this year. “There are people who are working to fill in those gaps,” says Ferm. “Folks at [the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art] and at Yale Union are stepping up their game in terms of experimental video and film.”
But what Ferm sees as Cinema Project’s deepest legacy, one she hopes will be carried on by other local film organizations, is the plea “not to think there are two different camps: the film people and the visual-art people…to be able to take experimental cinema seriously as a different, political, radical way of looking at the world.”
SEE IT: Abstraction, Difference and Presence: The Work of Jean-Paul Kelly will play at NXT Industries, 1302 SE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., on Thursday, Feb. 23. 7:30 pm. $8 suggested donation. Jean-Paul Kelly will be in attendance.