So Fresh It Floats

[April 30th, 2008]

Fool me once, shame on me. Last year, previewing the Portland Documentary and eXperimental Film Festival , I dedicated 450 peevish words to decrying the inane fringe-left arguments of the opening-night movie. Meanwhile, at the portion of the PDX Fest that really mattered—the Peripheral Produce Invitational —groundbreaking filmmakers from around the country were competing between audience sing-alongs to see who could debut the most peculiar labor of love. The winner, 92-year-old George Andrus of Albany, exhibited oozing rainbows he extracted from soap film. The most reactionary Republican couldn’t have objected to Andrus’ work: Soap, whatever else can be said of it, has no politics.

To be fair, I couldn’t have seen any of these movies before the Invitational; they weren’t screened in advance. (If you’ve ever tried to send soap bubbles to a reviewer, you know they rarely survive the mail.) But I won’t be fooled again: This year, as the seventh annual PDX Fest unspools from tonight, April 30, through Sunday, May 4, I’ll be enthusiastically waiting to see if Andrus can defend his title Saturday night, or if a new talent will vanquish him with something as crowd-pleasing as the View-Master biography of a cockroach. (That entry, from local conceptual artist Vladimir, was the 2004 champion—she handed out 400 View-Masters to the audience, then asked for them back when the insect drama was complete.) And I’ll reserve judgment on Friday’s first-ever Experimental Filmmaker Karaoke Showdown : The new videos for barroom song standards may be willfully difficult, a delightful novelty, or both. Upon entering the chamber of cinematic freaks first constructed by local filmmaker Matt McCormick in 1996, it’s probably best to bear in mind that experimental movies are allowed to cut loose and surprise. If only there were a handy slogan about maintaining Portland’s oddness!

That said, the portions of the festival that were offered for critical evaluation by fest organizers Peripheral Produce this year are far more promising than last year’s crop. The opening-nighter is certainly a vast improvement over the 2007 headliner (a dreary anti-government sermon called Strange Culture). Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell (7:30 pm Wednesday, April 30) is a swift, wistful documentary tracing the 40-year life of a musician from Okaloosa, Iowa, who moved to New York City and composed both club hits and faintly melodious cello arrangements before dying of AIDS in 1992. Russell’s music was above all graceful—in recordings, he sounds like Nick Drake discovering disco—and director Matt Wolf’s movie is true to its subject. Wild Combination’s horizontal tracking shots accentuate the flatness of the Iowa plains; Russell’s compassionate parents transcend it.

Space does not permit a full inventory of the festival’s nooks and crannies, but among the standouts is Shana Moulton’s Whispering Pines series (8 pm Friday, May 2), a pastel acid trip—complete, as all such experiences should be, with an appearance by Angela Lansbury. Moulton’s work looks like an episode of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse directed by David Lynch, while Kelly Sears’ short The Drift (5:30 pm Sunday, May 4) mixes The Twilight Zone with 1950s magazine photography. More down to earth—a miniature earth, in fact—is David Fenster’s 20-minute doc The Livelong Day (4:30 pm Thursday, May 1), which profiles model-railroad engineers.

But one entry in PDX Fest most clearly represents an astonishing leap forward: Linas Phillips’ Great Speeches from a Dying World (6:30 pm Thursday, May 1). Phillips’ first documentary, Walking to Werner, which played in Portland last year, hinted at the director’s talent for empathy in several highway encounters with lost souls. But as Phillips hiked to meet his hero Werner Herzog, he hogged the camera with pity for himself, and his youthful narcissism undercut his better instincts. Great Speeches also has a gimmick—homeless men and women ascend from the streets of Seattle to the pinnacles of Western rhetoric with brief recitations of Abraham Lincoln, Sojourner Truth and Chief Sealth—but what might have been an exercise in condescension becomes, in Phillips’ hands, a meticulously observed chronicle of terror and addiction, softened only by strikes of mordant humor. (“Never play around with your wife’s sister,” advises a man sweeping a parking garage. “It doesn’t work.”)

The film eventually narrows its focus to Tomey Smith, an HIV-positive crack addict who explains how his life spiraled after he lost his dog: “It sounds like a corny reason, but after doing 15 years in the joint, you get pretty attached to something.” By the time Smith reads John Donne’s “Meditation XVII,” we sense that the poem is a way for him to see himself as a part of humanity. “Each man’s death diminishes me,” he says, “for I am involved in all mankind.” Great Speeches involves its audience in Smith’s life—and even if the PDX Fest offers no other surprises, it has enlarged us by showing this movie.