Posts Tagged ‘film’
There’s a great crop of recent documentaries about the visual arts, and SPACE Gallery has picked some juicy ones for their new SCOPE film series. First up on Thursday, September 9th, is a screening of the new documentary, Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child. Screenings will continue monthly for the rest of the year and then bi-monthly in 2011. SCOPE will feature films that focus on artists, designers, architects, collectors and curators in the visual arts. The lineup for the rest of the year includes Milton Glaser: To Inform & Delight on Thursday, October 7th; Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine on Thursday, November 11th; and Herb and Dorothy on Thursday, December 9th. All screenings are at SPACE Gallery, 538 Congress St. Doors open at 7:00pm and films start at 7:30pm. General admission is $7 and $5 for SPACE members and students w/ ID.
Aurora Photos, one of the world’s premier photo agencies for outdoor adventure photographers, has branched out into a lot of areas in the 15 years they have been based in Portland, and are an important fixture in our photography community. As a fun way of building awareness and boosting the creative community, Aurora and their multimedia division Aurora Novus, are hosting TechMaine‘s monthly Metro NETpm networking gathering for creatives (and techs) at their offices (81 West Commercial Street, suite 201, in the Star Match Building) this coming Thursday, August 5th, from 5 to 7 pm. The poster says free cocktails and appetizers, so the networking is bound to be well lubricated.
image courtesy Aurora Photos
YouTube not doing it for you any more? Want to find out who really did all of the arty stuff first, some of it more than 75 years ago? You’re in luck. Visiting Curator (and part-time Portland resident) Kenneth White is giving a screening series beginning next Monday at MECA called Understanding Media that runs for five consecutive nights, July 18-23, 6-9 pm at Osher Hall on the second floor of the MECA Porteous Building, 522 Congress Street. From local Maine favorite William Wegman to avant-garde heavy weights including Marcel Duchamp, Chantal Akerman, Maya Deren and Jean-Luc Godard, White has selected 30 films and videos that demonstrate the forefront of moving image making from from Fernand Léger’s Ballet Mécanique in 1924 to Paul Chan’s BAGHDAD IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER (2003). The (air-conditioned) series costs $50 and you can register through the MECA Continuing Studies Program.
You can tell a lot about a town based on the quality of their independent video stores, and Portland’s Videoport is a film major’s mecca. Like going to a great wine shop where the employees have really tasted the wines, Videoport’s staff really knows their stuff. But how to keep up with their selection of over 25,000 movies? Fortunately the film geeks at Videoport write weekly video reports (they’re up to #254) on their blog, Videoport Jones. Dennis Perkins (and his pseudonymous “ladyfriend” Elsa S. Customer) write a review for each day of the week, tip you off to each day’s special deals (“Wacky and Worldly Wednesday,” etc.) and trumpet new releases and arrivals. Real customers are invited (strongly encouraged? begged?) to contribute reviews as well.
It’s people that make the creative economy in Portland work, and there’s an incredible density of smart people in all of our different creative communities. These communities overlap and intersect, but in many ways are not visible to each other. People in other cities have a sense of this density from the people that they know here, but nobody really sees it all. Until now. This is an open invitation to all the members of the Portland creative community to add yourself to our new visual directory at creativeportlandpeople.org. We have categories covering just about everything and will add more as people point out what we’ve missed. Our goal is to be the definitive, inclusive catalog of Portland’s creative talent, so please, post yourself and tell your friends and co-workers. The bigger the party, the better for Portland, and for us all.
Full disclosure, Creative Portland People is not an original idea. A young web genius in Portland, Oregon, Chris Kalani (founder of the excellent image gallery site, yay!everyday) built Prtlnd.com (wish we had thought of that name!) to display the creative community that he’s a part of. Back here in our Portland, Kevin Brooks and his partners at Forge migrated the idea for the circle of marketing and media creatives that they know as creativeportland.me (wish we had thought of that name, too!). We liked what they were all doing, and thought they had found a great, easy, visual form to make community visible, but our mission is much broader. So, enter Creative Portland People. We have added a much longer column of tags to choose from and the ability to include a brief tweet length sentence about who you are. Our site is “cobbled” in Tumblr much like Kalani’s original. This means that it’s not completely automated, so PLEASE follow the upload instructions. We do review the submissions before posting, and we will fix what we can or contact you if we need your input, but the closer your submission is to what the template requires, the faster we can post it. Please contact us with any questions or if you want us to add a tag.
Troll 2 may or may not be the worst movie ever made (it now rates at only the 61st worst in the IMDB Bottom 100), but clearly it is a work of “legendary ineptitude” that has become an “internationally revered cinematic failure.” Into a world where the word “fail” has become a noun and turtle-loving little boys in zombie face paint become YouTube stars, enter Best Worst Movie, a documentary about what happened to the hapless stars of Troll 2 when it became an unexpected cult hit. Best Worst Movie will show at SPACE Gallery tonight and Friday, June 9 and 11 at 7:30 (538 Congress Street).
If you missed it last year, now’s your chance. One Longfellow Square will hold their DudeFest 2010 screening of the Coen Brothers’ cult classic, The Big Lebowski, this Saturday, May 29 at 8pm. White Russians promise to be on special all night, and bathrobe-wearers (see above for style match) get in for $3!
Director and producer Sharyn Paul Brusie and cinematographer Kevin Brusie of Wonder Dog Films in Portland have just released their first music video. Traveling Man by soulful Portland folk singer Lyle Divinsky was shot in Maine and New York City. The song is the title track of his new album. Sharyn also produces documentaries for MPBN through Wonder Dog and Kevin is a first-rate portrait and location photographer. Fortunately, Lyle didn’t have to be a traveling man to get his video shot.
Lyle Divinsky, “Traveling Man” Directed by Sharyn Paul Brusie from Kevin Brusie on Vimeo.
A big weekend for the Portland farm-to-table/sustainable-agriculture/local-food/slow-food community. SPACE Gallery is hosting the Food+Farm film series beginning thursday, May 22. The four films that will be screened are Dirt (Thursday @7:30 pm), Ingredients (Friday @7:30 pm), Colony (Saturday @7:30) and The End of the Line (Sunday @7:30pm). Cultivating Community will host a Wake Up the Farm Party to get their Boyd Street Urban Garden started for the season on Saturday morning at 9am. Go get your hands dirty.
