Skip to main contentPeripheral Produce isn't peripheral anymore. Matt McCormick's video-production label has blossomed into a national force on the experimental-movie scene, and its eighth annual Portland Documentary and eXperimental Film Festival (PDX Film Fest for shorties) is the most vibrant of this city's many movie showcases. The linchpin events are the Experimental Filmmaker Karaoke Throwdown (Holocene, 10 pm Friday, May 8) and the Peripheral Produce Invitational (Clinton Street Theater, 8:30 pm Saturday, May 9), a cage match of specially crafted shorts from across the country. The content of those two programs is impossible to predict, but here's what we have seen:
Bruce Conner: In Memoriam
The revelatory experience of first encountering Bruce Conner's films produces that same "holy shit" mind shock you felt when you discovered the Ramones or the Stooges or Borges or Burroughs. You realize: So this is where everything changed. Conner's methods—found-footage collage, rapid cutting, pop-music lifts—are rooted in the experiments of Vertov, Buñuel and Joseph Cornell (to name a few), but something special happens to the disparate strains of the avant-garde in Conner's short films. The second night highlights Conner's meditative side, with the eerie associative editing of Take the 5:10 to Dreamland coming terrifyingly close to actually convincing me I was dreaming. The retrospective concludes with Easter Morning, Conner's last film and as good a way to say goodbye as any: Plants, lights, flesh and sky flow into each other to the sounds of Terry Riley, and for a few minutes, the screen seems more alive than usual, and so do we. CHRIS STAMM. 7:30 pm Wednesday, May 6.
Ben Coonley
Remember Valentine for Perfect Strangers, that 2006 viral-video smash featuring a feral cat named Otto communicating his love through a text-to-speech engine and superimposing his mewling face over Mark Linn-Baker? (It's stuck in your brain; just hunt around in there.) Turns out it wasn't the work of some accidental cuteness savant but a very intentional art project by Bard-trained Ben Coonley, who has plenty more open-source absurdity where that came from. Coonley's fixations range from Frankfurt School philosopher Walter Benjamin to Getty stock images—not really that much of a stretch—and the result is works like The Best Gifts, which pastes a Jar Jar Binks avatar over Christo's Gates installation, set to the tune of Guns N' Roses' "November Rain" guitar breakdown. Intrigued, but find that a little of this stuff goes a long way? You're not the only one. AARON MESH. 7 pm Thursday, May 7.
Peggy Ahwesh
If you don't know much about experimental cinema, and want to find out what people loathe and love about it, but only have time for one PDX Film Fest screening this year, then this selection of films by Peggy Ahwesh is for you. Martina's Playhouse, an artless and self-indulgent home movie that should never have left home, is the sort of reflexive washout that requires the resuscitative efforts of academic journals to attain relevance. But then there's The Scary Movie, a sly and unsettling riff on horror tropes starring two young girls playing the most menacing game of dress-up ever. Remember, these films are called "experimental" for a reason: Experiments fail as often as they succeed. Or at least they should. CHRIS STAMM. 7:30 pm Friday, May 8.
California Company Town
Probably the least surprising selection of the festival—documentarian Lee Ann Schmidt's penchant for derelict landscapes fits exactly into the groove McCormick started hitting two years ago with his Future So Bright installation—California Company Town is also the best. Schmidt has a far more political bent than McCormick: She films some three dozen industry-controlled burgs—from logging outposts to East Bay oil-corporation factory sprawl—in various states of disrepair, linking them to corporate avarice that she paints as a blight on the land. Whether or not you're persuaded by her thesis, her patience in combining still, long shots with minimal narration casts a spell, exposing the underside of the Golden State as lonesome, ornery and mean. Watch for the appalling splendor of Calico, a mining outpost turned into a tourist trap by Knott's Berry Farm (with Native Americans in full feathered regalia, sneaking a cigarette break). AARON MESH. 5:30 pm Saturday, May 9.
O'er the Land
The fest ends somewhat problematically with Deborah Stratman's O'er the Land, a ranging document of middle-American ritual. Employing the watch-and-wait patience of Frederick Wiseman, Stratman zeroes in on the beauty and strangeness of war re-enactments, high-school football games and RV parks. Her final destination is an apocalyptic weapons demonstration in Kentucky, where Stratman finds an interviewee who gives her (and us) what I was afraid Stratman (and I) were looking for all along: a spiel about "freedoms" and the Second Amendment that confirms my worst (and possibly misguided?) fears about that stretch of land between oceans. Until that moment, though, Stratman is an ideal cinematic tour guide, the kind who stands back and lets you figure it out for yourself. CHRIS STAMM. 8 pm Sunday, May 10.
PDX Film Fest plays Wednesday-Sunday, May 6-10, at the Clinton Street Theater. Find complete listings at pdxfilmfest.com.
WWeek 2015