TBA’S FILM PROGRAMMING runs the gamut this year—some of
it traverses cities, some of it virtually stands still; some of it
spans the globe, and some of it stays right here in Portland’s
backyard.
Of particular local interest is the obscure 1996 film Crock: The
Motion Picture, produced by artists and musicians in the city’s
indie art scene. Crock, a full-length Hi8 feature based on comic
strip about the French Foreign Legion, was so underground that
virtually no trace of its existence remains, aside from a few listings
of its soundtrack by the band Bugskull.
The story is concerned with the efforts of Pretty Boy and his sister
Flossie to overthrow the colonial regime in an unspecified North
African country. Flossie employs an all-woman militia, while Pretty
Boy, with a legionnaire named Maggot, seeks to steal the iron fist of
Commandant Vermin P. Crock.
Crock‘s screening at TBA marks the 13th anniversary of
the Portland film, complete with live commentary from the director and
principal actors on Saturday, September 5—and a chance for
audiences to decide whether this long-buried classic really deserves to
see the light of day.
Another local offering comes from Melody Owen, whose circles and
spinning wheels and if i could crowd all my souls into that
mountain are two collections of short films, assembled on her
travels and featuring a wide variety of cinematic styles. Music video,
short-form documentary, and animation all play a part in exploring
Euclidean geometry (circles and spinning wheels) and Owen’s
exploration of the artist (if i could crowd all my souls into that
mountain).
Speaking of artistic exploration, what happens when an actor’s
greatest tool is taken away? For Erased James Franco, the
single-named director Carter asked actor James Franco to reenact scenes
from a multitude of his small and big screen projects. However, Carter
asked that Franco not emotionally delve into the various characters
he’d played before. The result is a man putting on gestures and masks
as if he were trying on clothes in a department store. It’s odd to see
Franco move through a one-man, live-action montage of his career,
picking up a telephone again and again, each ring representing another
soulless line without an emotion behind it.
TBA also includes two silent slideshows from Hitoshi Toyoda, which
walk the line between film and photographic installation. The images
made by this self-taught photographer are essentially first-person
narrative documentation of his daily life, but each color-saturated
photograph functions as a frame of film ticking by at slow speed. In
other hands, this sort of documentation might lead to a kind of
tedious, neurotic self-reflection—but Toyoda has traveled far and
wide with his eyes trained toward those he meets and their
environments, rather than toward himself. Nazuna includes such
diverse subjects as a security guard working on his dream to become a
famous kickboxer and the search for Japanese Amish. Toyoda’s other
slideshow, spoonfulriver, documents another journey that takes
him from the streets of New York, through Copenhagen and Japan, and
back to New York.
If Toyoda’s manual slideshows are film slowed to a crawl, Between
Us is the art-film equivalent of a high-speed chase. In Between
Us, Tyler Wallace and Nicole Dill prove that you aren’t invisible
inside your car. In fact they’ve gone out of their way to make
themselves as visible as possible. The performance concerns an
ostensibly private conversation between two people, taking place in the
comfort of a moving car. But as the couple travel, video of their
dialogue is streamed live over the internet. When they reach their
final destination, the conversation becomes larger than life as the car
becomes a makeshift projector and the performers voices are amplified.
It’s a brash meditation on the fact that many of our private moments
are only imagined.