You can see Bill Plympton’s frame by frame restoration of Winsor McCay’s 1921 seven minute long masterpiece at the 35th Portland International Film Festival.

It will screen on Feb. 18 at 12:30 PM as part of SHORT CUTS II: INTERNATIONAL TIES.

Bill Plympton’s love of animation history is all over his recent coffee table book memoir Independently Animated: Bill Plympton: The Life and Art of the King of Indie Animation.

Oregon Cartoon Institute is proud to count Plympton among its earliest and most enthusiastic supporters.

Oregon Cartoon Institute is holding its second public meeting on Sunday, Feb. 12, at 2:00 PM at 5th Avenue Cinema.

All friends and fans of Oregon Cartoon Institute are invited. If you think you might belong to this group, you do.

The agenda includes a brief introduction to the all volunteer Institute, and a discussion of what is up next. We’ll have announcements from the Mel Blanc Project and the Homer Davenport Project, some proposals to consider, and some hand outs to take home.

Reminder: last time the Institute met, Dennis Nyback supplied home made refreshments.

This year our featured attraction is a rare screening of The Little Baker, a stop motion animation short by early Portland filmmaker Lewis Clark Cook (1909 – 1983). We will also screen a ten-minute profile of Cook, made for OPB in the early 1980’s by Portland artist Jim Blashfield.

Michele Kribs, who was trained by Cook to succeed him as head of Oregon Historical Society’s Moving Image Archive, will be in attendance.

In the photo above, use of which was generously made possible by the Oregon Historical Society, Lew Cook is 15 years old. That is his own 35mm camera. A doting aunt, knowing that he was in love with the movies, bought it for him. He quit selling newspapers and went to work as a newsreel photographer.

Top Four Reasons You Might Want To See The Little Baker:

4. Cook made his living as an independent filmmaker using more tricks than you can imagine. Just as Bill Plympton turned down Disney, Lew Cook turned down Warner Brothers. He chose independence. Besides Plympton, the other Portland filmmakers who followed Cook’s lead include Homer Groening, Will Vinton, Joan Gratz, Jim Blashfield, Gus Van Sant, Rose Bond and  Joanna Priestley.

3. The Little Baker was made “in the 1920’s” which means Cook could have made it anywhere between age 11 and age 20. Come help us sleuth out clues as to whether this is the work of a hard working child or an uninhibited adult.

2.  No one else you know has seen this film.

1. Will Vinton credited The Little Baker with inspiring him to consider clay animation. Who knows what it will inspire you to do!

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This event is a partnership between Oregon Cartoon Institute, Oregon Historical Society and 5th Avenue Cinema.

Thank you to Kerry Tymchuk, Michele Kribs and Scott Rook of Oregon Historical Society.

Thank you to Heather Petrocelli of 5th Avenue Cinema and PSU’s Public History Interest Group.

Where did Joanna Priestley get her title “Queen of Independent Animation”? From Bill Plympton, King of the same. At the suspenseful and highly competitive Art vs Commerce Animation Smackdown which took place at the Platform Festival in 2007, Bill and Joanna went mano a mano.

Bill’s account:

…Joanna Priestley, famed Portland animator, came on stage wearing a robe and boxing gloves, and smacked me around on stage. She showed three abstract films, alternating between my three favorite funny films, including Signe Baumane’s “Teat Beat of Sex”, which even made Joanna laugh. Joanna’s husband was the score-keeper (he had an applause meter) and she stacked the crowd with her friends, so naturally she won – just barely, though, with a score of 6.5 to 6. But it was such a raucous success, we believe that we’ll return for Round 2 next year.

If you missed the smack down in 2007, you can catch Joanna at the Whitsell Auditorium on January 28, 2012 at 7:00 PM. This evening of films, which includes FIVE premieres, is part of Northwest Film Center’s Northwest Tracking series.

The program includes EYE LINER (2011), a meditation on facial recognition; SPLIT ENDS (2012), which probes perception and cognition through the use of multi-layered patterns inspired by wrapping and wallpaper designs; CHOKING HAZARD (2012), a whirlwind tour of best intentions gone awry in the recycling of plastic; DEAR PLUTO SLIDESHOW (2011), an amusing behind-the-scenes look at the making of DEAR PLUTO (2012), a tribute to everyone’s favorite planetoid from the poem “Pizza” by Taylor Mali; and MISSED ACHES (2009), a witty commentary about proofreading and the indiscriminate use of spellcheck, written and narrated by poet Taylor Mali.

Joanna Priestley will be there, of course.

Pittsburgh has George Romero, Baltimore has John Waters, and Boulder has the memory of Stan Brakhage.

Portland has Gus Van Sant, Bill Plympton, Matt Groening, Mike Richardson, Jon Raymond, Aaron Katz, Chel White, Jacob & Arnold Pander, James Westby, Jim Blashfield, Joan Gratz, Joanna Priestley, Matt McCormick, Rose Bond, Vanessa Renwick and Will Vinton.

Ever wonder why?

For cities wishing to replicate Portland’s densely populated cinematic scene, here’s a handy “how to” guide.

1.  Start early.

As soon as people were making films in New York and Fort Lee, they were making them in Portland. Portland’s first film studio, American Lifeograph, opened in 1910. That’s the same year movies came to Hollywood.

2. Have a show business friendly mayor.

During the 16 year tenure of theater-owner-turned-mayor George Baker, downtown Portland was wall to wall theaters. John Gilbert, Clark Gable, William Powell, Edward Everett Horton and Eugene Pallette are some of the actors who jumpstarted their acting careers on the Portland stage, some of them in Baker’s own stock company. It was Baker who renamed Seventh Avenue “Broadway”.

3. Support innovation.

Oregon’s oldest source of print media, The Oregonian, responded to the puzzling new medium of radio by setting up a station right in the Oregonian Tower. Radio later served as an Early Warning System to identify the talent of Portlanders Mel Blanc, Suzanne Burce (renamed Jane Powell by MGM) and Johnnie Ray.

4. Grow your own film processing lab.

After WWII, Portland inventor Frank Hood went to work for a brand new electronics firm named Tektronix. He set up his own home lab to process films he made for them, after losing patience with the delays of sending film to LA. Eventually, he went into business as Teknifilm Lab. For decades, independent filmmaking in Portland was supported by Hood’s lax attitude toward payment schedules.

5. Provide a home for an exiled Hollywood film scholar.

Andries Deinum came to Portland during the blacklist. His vision of film as a mode of social discourse laid the groundwork for PSU’s Center For The Moving Image, housed in Lincoln Hall. Jim Blashfield, Bill Plympton, and Matt Groening were among the faithful attendees of the Center’s influential screening series, run by the Portland State Film Committee.

6. Provide a day job for the guy who wants to mentor the guy who wants to revive the archaic art form of stop motion animation.

Homer Groening led a dual life – ad man by day and experimental filmmaker by night. He had a family, a home, and his own business doing what he loved – and he did it all without leaving Portland. Aspiring filmmaker Will Vinton paid attention, and followed suit. His career, like Groening’s, would encompass both television commercials and art house films, but on a much larger scale.

7. Work with, not against, a pair of cinema addled students who want to start a regional film center.

When the National Endowment for the Arts decided to seed regional filmmaking, they went looking for the right person to submit a grant for a film center in Portland. They were pointed to Brooke Jacobson and Bob Summers, members of the Portland State Film Committee. Brooke and Bob wrote the grant, Portland Art Museum acted as fiscal sponsor, and the Northwest Film Center went into business. This year marks its 40th anniversary.

8. Work with, not against, a visionary film preservationist who wants to create a moving image archive.

Lew Cook was trained as a newsreel photographer by the first generation of Portland filmmakers. His stop motion film, The Little Baker, made circa 1925, proved prophetic when it came to Portland’s future claim to cinema history. He and Thomas Vaughn conceived Oregon Historical Society’s moving image archive, and Cook personally trained the preservationist, Michele Kribs, who currently presides over it.

To re-cap: by the end of the 1970’s, Portland had a film program at Portland State University, a film archive at Oregon Historical Society, and a regional film festival (now the NWFF) located at Portland Art Museum. That nucleus of film creativity on the park blocks was balanced by a film processing lab, an emerging animation studio, and a warehouse waiting to be filled with  filmmakers’ offices over in northwest Portland. No one entity owned the scene – the infrastructure and the support system served all comers.

The following timeline concentrates on factors which contributed to a culture where independent filmmakers supported each other in Portland. It does not address the important role played by Hollywood productions shooting in Oregon. The symbiotic role of Hollywood and the Indies in Portland is embodied in the career of Gus Van Sant who slips and slides with ease between these two worlds.

A timeline:

American Lifeograph founded 1910

Lewis Moomaw makes The Chechacos 1924

Lew Cook makes The Little Baker c1925

PGE makes It Can Be Done c1936

Tektronix founded 1946

Frank Hood founds Teknifilm Lab, early 1950’s

Andries Deinum arrives 1957

Homer Groening starts his own ad agency 1958

Center For The Moving Image founded 1965

Bob Summers and Brooke Jacobson found Northwest Film Center 197o

Tim Smith and Matt Groening make Drugs: Killers or Dillers 1972

Brooke Jacobson founds Northwest Media Project 1974

Will Vinton and Bob Gardiner make Closed Mondays 1974

Don Zavin makes Fast Break 1977

Penny Allen makes Property 1979

Rose Bond makes Gaia’s Dream 1982

Gus Van Sant makes Mala Noche 1985

Bill Plympton makes Your Face 1987

Matt Groening makes The Simpsons 1987

Jim Blashfield makes Leave Me Alone 1988

Joan Gratz makes Mona Lisa Descending A Staircase 1992

Gus Van Sant makes Good Will Hunting 1997.

Miranda July makes The Amateurist 1998

Chris Eyre makes Smoke Signals 1998

Will Vinton makes The PJ’s 1999

Travis Knight makes Coraline 2009

Jon Raymond writes & Neil Kopp produces Meek’s Cutoff 2010, one of five Oregon films at Sundance in 2011.

This post is dedicated to Portland filmmaker/film writer David Walker, who inspired it by raising the question “how rare is regional filmmaking, anyway?”

Bill Plympton took his career as an animator to 11 when he decided to go from hand drawing every frame of animated shorts to hand drawing every frame of animated features.

The Tune was the first successful theatrical feature produced, directed and animated by one person. It went to both Cannes and Sundance.

The soundtrack for The Tune was written by Maureen McElheron. Here’s her account of how she began working with Bill:

THE TUNE was the first soundtrack I composed for Bill but our first project was YOUR FACE.. Bill and I performed in a country band in NY City before he was an animator….he enjoyed my original songs so when he started to pursue animation, he called on me to compose YOUR FACE.

We slowed down my vocals for YOUR FACE in the studio so it would sound like a man was singing because Bill could not afford to hire a man! YOUR FACE went on to be nominated for an Academy Award.

For later projects, I often co wrote songs with Hank Bones…..we recorded in his studio in Brooklyn. Hank, a talented musician/ vocalist played all the instruments for our sessions as well as acting as recording engineer.

Bill Plympton’s DIY genius extended to finding others who shared it. McElheron not only wrote the soundtrack to The Tune, she also provided the voice of Didi.

I hereby claim The Tune as an Oregon film on the basis of its director, Oregon born and raised Bill Plympton.

Lazlo Kovacs makes himself at home in the Pacific Northwest by improvising a regionally appropriate camera mount inside a production vehicle for Five Easy Pieces. Taken in Eugene, this photo is by cameraman Ron Vidor.

Q: What are you doing, Anne?

A:  My goal is to write about Oregon film history, film by film. Oregon Movies A to Z has been up, in some fashion, since October 2008.

Q: That’s not what it looks like! You’re writing about all kinds of stuff.

A: I also write – not comprehensively at all – about current film events. I go back and blog about older films when I discover one I missed when I was going through that particular year. But chronological progress is still taking place, if you look for it. The forward thrust of my walk through film history is there in the blog, although it is obscured with distractions and digressions.

Right now I am moving through 1993, an unusual, and unusually trying, year. I was warned about it by the panel of fellow critics who spoke at the Oregon Sesquicentennial Film Festival in 2009. They were openly skeptical of my ability to maintain interest in Oregon film, which to them meant films shot in Oregon. I dismissed their concern – I knew they were not factoring in the great films Oregon filmmakers (and actors and writers) had made outside the state boundaries. It was only when David Walker specifically mentioned “1993″ and they all turned, with one motion, David Walker, Shawn Levy, Ted Mahar and Aaron Mesh, to look at me, that I began to have some grasp of what I would have to endure.

I thought my film loving peers were underestimating me when they expressed concern over my headlong flight into a wall of deeply unenjoyable cinema.

But they were right. It took weeks to recover from seeing The Temp (1993), and the one two punch of The Temp followed by Body Of Evidence (1993) nearly caused me to give up movies all together.

A: So how do you identify an Oregon film?

Q: Here’s the rules. I am creating a chronological record of Oregon film history. I define “Oregon film” to include films made in Oregon, and also to include films featuring the work of Oregon artists – directors, actors, writers, you name it – regardless of their location. I try to pair each film with a companion post, either about the director or about the Oregon artist who caused the film to qualify as an Oregon film.

A rule of thumb: I write this history chronologically. Right now I am still in 1993.

Another rule of thumb: I use the year IMDB lists as the year of the film. Oregon Film Commission lists the films by the year of shooting. I list them by year of release.

Handy Guide to Nomenclature:

I denominate as Oregon films all films which qualify under the expanded definition detailed above.

I denominate as an Oregon director an artist who was born/born and raised/raised in Oregon or one who has made Oregon his/her home as an adult.

I denominate as Oregon filmmakers directors who came here to make films. My logic:  how can we call One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest an Oregon film, and not call Milos Forman an Oregon filmmaker? So, in the spirit of inclusion, on Oregon Movies, A to Z, he is one.

But he isn’t an Oregon director.

This distinction is useful because Oregon does happen to have produced an unusual number of internationally recognized directors.

Q: How do  you choose which films to write about?

A: Its true. I can’t write about all Oregon films. I choose the films I write about based on the following criteria.

1. Availability

2. Fame, of the film itself or of one of its principals

3. Whether I feel like it

This year, the third Oregon Movies, A to Z has been in existence, saw a tremendous rise in the numbers and the visibility of Oregon film. An almost freakish number of Oregon filmmakers came to national attention, pretty much all at the same time. Eight at Sundance, one at New Directors, one at Tribecca, one at Anthology Film Archives, two picked up for distribution by Oscilloscope. Then there was Carrie Brownstein’s Portlandia, which she co-produced. That’s in addition to Gus Van Sant at Cannes with Restless, Bill Plympton making the Oscar short list with The Cow Who Wanted To Be A Hamburger, and Chris Eyre’s A Year At Mooring.

In the contest for best reviews this year, there is a running tie between Cold Weather and Meek’s Cutoff, with Cold Weather slightly ahead. Meek’s Cutoff fans are dazed by the unexpected nature of the film they saw, while Cold Weather’s fans applaud Aaron Katz’ ability to integrate a recognizable genre and still maintain his distinctive style.

Throughout all of this, I remained focused on writing primarily about Oregon film history, not Oregon’s wildly prolific current scene. The current explosion, of course, has everything to do with the past. Gus Van Sant was not born under a cinematic cabbage. Neither was Aaron Katz, Matt McCormick, James Westby or Vanessa Renwick.

Q: What is ahead for Oregon Movies, A to Z?

A: That giant sucking sound you heard last year was Oregon Movies, A to Z being pressed into service to cover the news of film premieres, film awards, breaking news of Oregon directors going into production. Nature abhors a vaccum! I post about current events because it fills a need, and allows me to link to previous posts which illuminate a connection to Oregon film history.

Q: So if you don’t always like these movies you’re watching, and writing about, why are you doing this?

3.  I am making sense, slowly but surely, of one of the great mysteries of life in Oregon, namely, what do we do here which has helped us create such wonderful directors?

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Thank you, Katherine Wilson, for the behind the scenes shot of Lazlo Kovacs preparing to shoot more of Five Easy Pieces.

Mayor Sam Adams added to his collection of original portraits of Portland filmmakers last week, unveiling a brand new painting of Todd Haynes by Jasper Marks.

City Hall custodians grumbled about the amount of work they face – Portland’s active film scene means the entire wall will soon be filled. The Mayor did not announce whether Marks, who moonlights in another profession under the name Steven Cohn, would be asked to paint the entire series. Some people believe Arnold Pander may be approached to help out.

Here are the names of some of the directors who, taken in conglomerate, represent Portland’s cinematic wealth:

Aaron Katz

Brian Lindstrom

Chel White

David Weissman

Donal Mosher

Gus Van Sant

Irene Taylor Brodsky

Jacob & Arnold Pander

James Westby

Jim Blashfield

Joan Gratz

Joanna Priestley

Lance Bangs

Larry Johnson

Marilyn Zornado

Matt McCormick

Michael Palmieri

Mike Shiley

Peter D. Richardson

Rose Bond

Sue Arbuthnot

Vanessa Renwick

Will Vinton

It is because Sam Adams is only Mayor of Portland, and not Governor of the State of Oregon that the following filmmakers will escape inclusion on his Hall of Fame:

Alex Cox

Bruce Campbell

Bill Plympton

Chris Eyre

Matthew Lessner

James Ivory

James Longley

Shelley Jordon

Susan Saladoff

Gus Van Sant returns to Festival de Cannes, on the evening of Thursday, May 12, to open the “Un Certain Regard” competition with his latest film, Restless.

Shot in Portland, Restless stars Mia Wasikowska and Henry Hopper.

Here’s Gus Van Sant’s history at Cannes:

Gus Van Sant received the Palme d’or in 2003 for Elephant and the 60th anniversary award for Paranoid Park (2007). His first nomination at the Festival de Cannes was in 1995 for To Die For.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I submit the track record Gus Van Sant (Portland), James Ivory (Klamath Falls) and Bill Plympton (Oregon City) have at Cannes as solid proof all Oregonians are secretly French.

From Woodswoman (2010), by Vanessa Renwick

I went to a screening of experimental films at Anthology Film Archives in the mid 1990’s where the most interesting film of the program was a home basement video, found in a thrift shop, which had been shot by two uncredited amateurs. The filmmaker ( the person who had claimed and re-purposed this video as art, without changing it one bit  ) had found it, of course, in Portland.

That’s how hip Portland is, cinematically.

Very proud to see Vanessa at Anthology! The last time I was there to see work by a Portland filmmaker, it was with Walt Curtis to see Walt Curtis: The Peckerneck Poet, directed by Bill Plympton.

Here’s the info from Flaherty NYC:

Flaherty NYC Presents: “MIX ME A WALK” – 5 Films by Vanessa Renwick
Monday, April 11 at Anthology Film Archives - Filmmaker in person for disucssion!

Prolific and iconoclastic Oregon filmmaker Vanessa Renwick comes to Anthology to present an adrenaline-pumping, awe-inspiring and sometimes brutal program of new works on video, including several NYC premieres. “MIX ME A WALK” is a both meditation and a holler, using stunning cinematography and rare archival fragments to offer up both the grandeur and the violence of nature. Wolves, coyotes,ravens, eagles, elk, bears, horses and bison may be the stars of this show, but these five films amply demonstrate why Renwick has been a star in the underground film scene for the past couple decades.

One of the cornerstones of Portland’s remarkably fecund scene for moving-image art.
Ed Halter, Rhizome

Filmmaker and curator Vanessa Renwick invites us to contemplate death, and to do so with a proper mix of wrenching horror and ecstatic wonder.
Holly Willis, L.A. Times

Renwick is one of the city’s most venerated filmmakers, having portrayed in more than 20 films everything from nude bicyclists(The Yodeling Lesson) and gray wolves (Critter) to poetic portraits of now-gone local landmarks (Portrait #2: Trojan) and biographies of cantankerous fellow outsider artists (Richart).
Brian Libby, The Oregonian

The program begins with Red Stallion’s Revenge (16mm to video, 7 min., 2007), a remixed and re-scored 1943 western shot at the base of Mt. Shasta, featuring the grudge match of the century between a horse and a bear.

We then leave the animals behind and enter the realm of humans and trees.Food is a Weapon (16mm & Super8 to video, 4 min., 1998) uses haunting logging footage from the 1940’s, revealing old growth treasures looted for the war effort. A eulogy for trees.

Next up is the poignant Woodswoman (video, 10 min., 2010). One hypnotically watches the book “Woodswoman” by Anne LaBastille burning in a fireplace, and learns the place of the book in Renwick’s life, as well as the fate of Anne LaBastille.

We move on to FULL ON LOG JAM (video, 16 min., 2010), a meditation on the forests of the Cascade Mountain Range in Northern Oregon, capturing the grandeur of nature in a way that makes us all too aware of our human transience and vulnerabilities. This video ends with documentation of a Native American on the Warm Springs Reservation splitting firewood at a very, very slow and methodical pace. Using primarily a wedge and a hand sledge, and occassionally a maul, he never misses the log.

His focus and patience prepare us for something of the perseverance witnessed in the Hope and Prey (3-channel video, 23 min., 2010), featuring stunning wildlife cinematography of animals hunting and being hunted in a winter landscape. Wolves, coyotes, ravens, eagles, elk and bison are the stars. The adrenaline-pumping dramatic and sometimes brutal nature cinematography is transformed and elevated through black and white high-contrast recomposition and a hyper-dynamic score by Portland’s infamous underground composer, Daniel Menche.

ABOUT THE FILMMAKER

Vanessa Renwick’s iconoclastic artwork reflects an interest in place, relationships between bodies and landscapes, and all sorts of borders. She is a naturalist, born, not made: a true barefoot and cinematic rabblerouser. Working in experimental and poetic documentary forms since 1983, she has made over 45 films, videos and installations, shown widely and internationally at places like MOMA, The Andy Warhol Museum, The Kitchen, New York Underground Film Festival, Migrating Forms, PDX Festival, Kill Your Timid Notion, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and The Viennale. She’s won many awards over the years, including the Gus Van Sant Award for Best Experimental Film at the Ann Arbor Festival and First Place in the Peripheral Produce 2001 World Championship Invitationals. As the director of The Oregon Dept. of Kick Ass, Renwick booked, programmed and toured The Lucky Bum Film Tour to over 70 venues across the U.S. and Canada, with Bill Daniel. Renwick is represented by PDX Contemporary Art.

Brad Bird demonstrates his Pacific Northwest roots by a) thanking Matt Groening, with whom he and Eric Goldberg shared the award, and b) asking his employees to “use all of the buffalo”.

Bird had to record his acceptance speech on video as he is out of the country scouting locations for his next film, Mission Impossible IV.

The good people over at Oregon Cartoon Institute would like to point out that Mel Blanc (Portland), Marc Davis (Klamath Falls), and Bill Plympton (Oregon City) preceded Matt Groening (Portland) and Brad Bird (Corvallis ) in receiving this award.

Congratulations, Brad!