Paranorman, the second stop motion feature from Laika, will open on August 17, 2012.

I hereby claim Paranorman in advance as an Oregon film, based on the fact that it was made in Oregon, and produced by Travis Knight, the Oregon filmmaker who also serves as one of its lead animators.

Chinook man in canoe, circa 1910, by Edward Curtis

Another lost film I hope I get to see!

Ron Finne’s Tamanawis Illahee is a perfect demonstration of Oregon’s deep, and deeply unacknowledged, biculturality. Here’s the synopsis from the Canyon Cinema catalog:

Tamanawis Illahee (Medicine Land) (1983) 58 min 16mm
A film of the Pacific Northwest, the native people, poetry, history and the forces of change.

“TAMANAWIS ILLAHEE, subtitled RITUALS AND ACTS IN A LANDSCAPE, is an homage to the Indian heritage of the Pacific Northwest and a study in the contrast of how native people used the land, as opposed to European settlers who gradually took it over. “It is experimental in style, combining time-lapse photography, archive footage, classic photographs by documentarist Edward Curtis, museum artifacts and other image sources.

“The film is a plea for a spiritual reconnection with native forebears
and a recognition of their heritage.” – Ted Mahar, The Oregonian

This film was made possible in part by a grant from the Oregon Committee for the Humanities, an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

I understand George Venn’s poem, Directions For Visitors, is featured in Tamanawis Illahee.

DIRECTIONS FOR VISITORS
by George Venn

Catch a few fish for yourself then–
under the falls is the best cast.
If my fire’s out, there’s still wood.
Make a fire of your own, eat, get warm,
and leave the same way you came by dark.
Please do not tell anyone where I live.
Try to forget this place all the way home.

Director Ron Finne is appearing at the April 2 screening of his 1972 film, Natural Timber Country, at the Whitsell.

I hereby claim Tamanawis Illahee, sight unseen, as an Oregon film, based on the Oregon citizenship of director Ron Finne.

“Ceci n’est pas une pipe” or “Ceci n’est pas une still from Ron Finne’s Natural Timber Country”

After reading about Natural Timber Country on 16mm Lost And Found, I discover that this lost film will be shown at the Whitsell on Monday, April 2, 2012 as part of NWFC’s Northwest Tracking/Essential Northwest series.

Director Ron Finne will be in attendance.

Here’s the description from 16mm Lost And Found:

Filmed by Oregon native Ron Finne, Natural Timber Country is the story of old-time logging in the forests of the Northwest. The film was originally available only by mail order from the director’s home in Springfield.

The film lacks a traditional narrator, instead giving us interviews with loggers taped in the field or their homes. To help us visualize the words of the loggers, Finne edits them together with shots of the Northwestern wilderness, both in Oregon and Washington. Also featured is old footage and photographs of loggers stump-rigging trees, skidding felled logs down greased tracks, and one of the first mechanical improvements in the logging business, a steam powered engine for moving larger timber. Also recalled are stunts and jokes of the loggers, such as standing at the very tip top of a limbed and topped tree, or jumping from one log to another as they rolled down a hill.

Above all, the message of the Natural Timber Country is an environmental one. As one man says at the outset of the film. “Timber all around you, you just never figure you’d use it up.”

I hereby claim Natural Timber Country as an Oregon film.

To brush up on this film’s antecedents, here’s a Handy Guide To Oregon Logging Films.

Elizabeth Peterson’s students made Lost And Found to document their work cataloging University of Oregon’s 16mm film collection.

I hereby claim Lost And Found as an Oregon film.

“Actually, I prefer not to have the cooperation of my subjects.” Nigel Nado

In Alexia Anastasio’s new documentary Adventures in Plymptoons, one remark is heard over and over again from the people being interviewed. They marvel that Bill Plympton consistently chooses, as an artist, to reveal all. Guns On the Clackamas is a great example of Bill’s confidence in process, and his thick skin when it comes to criticism. Bill taught himself how to make feature length narrative films. Guns On The Clackamas was part of that journey. Not every art house animator would choose to subject himself/herself to such trials.

Bill’s mock doc about the making of a fictional Western was made in his ancestral backyard. After years of sitting inside drawing frame after frame of films in which you control everything, I can see that going outside to collaborate with friends on a live action film which spoofs the filmmaking process itself would seem irresistible. If you are doing this in the backyard where you grew up playing cowboys and Indians, so much the better.

I am not sure but that Guns On The Clackamas is the first Western written and directed by an Oregonian which was actually shot in Oregon. This credential would be more impressive if Guns wasn’t a spoof.

Guns On The Clackamas was Bill Plympton’s first live action feature. Here’s his description:

Nigel Nado, the notable documentary filmmaker, is trying to make a behind-the-scenes movie about the making of the western “Guns on the Clackamas”. But everything is going wrong. The lead actress has a severe stutter, but since she’s also the Executive Producer’s mistress, when she’s fired, he pulls the plug on the film’s financing. Then, the cast members start dropping like flies, due to accidents on the set and some really bad catering…….

Guns On The Clackamas is not for Bill Plympton beginners. Its not the most important Plympton film to see. It is one of the most peculiar.

I hereby claim Guns On The Clackamas as an Oregon film on the basis of multiple qualifying criteria.

Stephen Herek made this time capsule so that people in the future would be able to see what a fully funded high school music program of the mid to late 20th century looked like. Richard Dreyfuss was Oscar nominated for his performance as Mr. Holland, an aspiring composer who ends up devoting his creative energies to his students.

In real life, Richard Dreyfuss began working as an actor at age 15. I don’t know if he graduated from high school. He attended Beverly Hills High.

Mr. Holland’s Opus is set in a fictional school in an unspecified city in an unspecified state. It was shot in Grant High School in NE Portland.

I can personally testify that the Mr. Holland of Patrick Sheane Duncan’s screenplay was not based on Grant’s own music teacher. Eugene Kaza was not an aspiring composer, and did not lose himself in his devotion to his students. He was exasperated, distant, responsible, and overworked. I am not the only one of his students who thought of him as the only real teacher, the only one who really saw us, in the entire school.

He sent his own children to Catlin Gable.

Grant at the height of the Baby Boom had over 3,000 students. Mr. Kaza would march the band around the neighborhood so we could practice turning corners. Girls were not allowed to wear pants to school. Wearing skirts meant you had to wear stockings. Wearing stockings meant you had to wear some kind of garter belt or girdle. Katie Davenport rose above all that by going barelegged all year.

Rick LeDoux burned a giant peace symbol into the front lawn as an anti-war protest. The English teacher wore a cape. The Geometry teacher looked lonely. The Latin teacher pointed out all the words in our textbook which did not actually exist in Roman times. In PE, we learned how to hurdle, to swim, and to do the polka.

Inexplicably, they left all this out of Mr. Holland’s Opus.

I hereby claim Mr. Holland’s Opus as an Oregon film on the basis of location shooting.

Based on Sheila Ballantyne’s novel, which was in turn based on her own life, Imaginary Crimes is a coming of age story where the heroine’s job is to protect her little sister from the downside of having a father who is a crook and a mother who is dead.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Because it is based on real life, the compassionate teacher (Vince D’Onofrio) is not a love interest for the young beauty (Fairuza Balk) already overwhelmed with grown up family responsibilities. Harvey Keitel is the father who wants to give his daughters what he can’t afford.

In a comedy, dad’s ineptitude would be the source of the joke. Imaginary Crimes is not a comedy.

Is there a “two sisters must survive” film genre? If so both Imaginary Crimes and Bill Forsythe’s Housekeeping belong to it.

I hereby claim Imaginary Crimes as an Oregon film on the basis of location shooting in Portland.

In the same year Vanessa Renwick made a perfect short film, The Yodeling Lesson (1998), Miranda July made her own perfect short film The Amateurist (1998), with Vanessa as her DP.

In the new issue of Plazm, Vanessa tells Nora Robertson that Miranda improvised all her lines as the mysterious Professional who constantly evaluates the equally mysterious caged Amateur.

I have such respect for this work!

From Australian Centre for the Moving Image:

The Amateurist features two figures, both portrayed by the artist, caught in an off-kilter relationship based on a system whose rules, boundaries and ultimate aim remain fascinatingly opaque.

The ‘Watcher’ views the ‘Amateur’ via a video surveillance system, suggesting numbers to her and interpreting the Amateur’s vague gestures and responses with a mixture of pride, concern and condescension. The Watcher considers herself the ultimate professional – telling us she has been engaged in this activity for four and half years – and yet the emotional intensity she has invested in this eerily empty activity is immediately evident.>

What is going on?

Here’s Miranda’s own description of The Amateurist.

I hereby claim The Amateurist as an Oregon film, on the basis of the location shooting, the Portland DP, and the at-the-time Portland filmmaker, Miranda July.

Lost, but now found!

Rockaday Richie was written and produced by Don Gronquist and directed by George Hood, son of Frank Hood, the founder of the all important Teknifilm Lab.

It is screening on Feb. 6, 7:00 PM at the Whitsell Auditorium, as part of the Essential Northwest series. Admission is pay what you wish.

Both filmmakers will be present.

The 1970’s saw the re-emergence of wholly independent feature filmmaking in the Rose City. Here’s the timeline:

Tom Moyers, Jr. and Will Vinton make The Circle in 1972

Don Gronquist and George Hood make Rockaday Richie and the Queen of the Hop in 1974 (For film scholars: I recommend Tim Smith’s thematically related The Case Of The Kitchen Killer , made in Portland the same year, for a great double feature)

Don Zavin makes Fast Break in 1977

Penny Allen makes Property in 1978, and Paydirt in 1981

Gus Van Sant makes Mala Noche in 1985

And then we were off and running.

Here’s more information, from NW Film Center:

VISITING ARTIST—Made at the same time as Terrence Malick’s BADLANDS, ROCKADAY (nationally released in 1975 as B-titled STARK RAVING MAD) is based on the infamous Starkweather-Fugate murder spree in 1958. Portland actors Russ Fast and Marcie Severson star as the pair who left a disastrous trail of carnage from Nebraska throughout the Midwest as they desperately tried to cover up one killing with another. Written and co-produced (with Tiger Warren) by Don Gronquist and shot by John Mincey, a large cross-section of the Portland film community worked on the film, which was also George Hood’s first feature. “A compelling, if modest, work … neither high-brow nor exploitation. Fast has a brooding presence and is genuinely chilling. … Severson has natural screen charm.”—Variety (88 mins.)

Brian Lindstrom comments “An underrated film! Truly worth seeing. Will make any independent filmmaker proud.”

Although I excuse myself from seeing Rockaday Richie and the Queen of the Hop because of my wimpy dislike of serial murdering, I do claim it as an Oregon film, based on the location shooting and the Oregon citizenship of the artists.

Oregon has a film at the Oscars this year.

Documentarian Marshall Curry followed Daniel McGowan from Brooklyn, where he was a graduate student, to Eugene, where he was an environmental activist,  to Illinois, where he is serving time in the Communication Management Unit, aka a highly restrictive federal prison. McGowan is serving a 7 year sentence for two counts of arson and conspiracy, one in Glendale and one in Clatskanie.

If A Tree Falls: A Story Of The Earth Liberation Front first aired on the PBS documentary series P.O.V. It has been nominated for an Academy Award in the category of Best Documentary.

From The Gothamist’s interview with Curry.

There’s some footage that you included in If a Tree Falls from the Warner Creek blockade in the mid-90’s, where activists were attempting to stop logging in a national forest in Oregon. Their encampment looks exactly like Zuccotti Park—the tents, the signs, everything. And it’s destroyed by the police, just like the Zuccotti encampment was. In what ways are eco-terrorism and “economic inequality terrorism,” as the authorities might call it, similar, and in what ways are they different?

I think there are a lot of thematic similarities between what happened in the 90s, in the environmental movement, and what we see now with the Occupy movement. There there are things that I was seeing on television as the Occupy movement was being covered that seem to be almost lifted from the movie. Whether it’s scenes like the one you describe where folks were being evicted from an encampment where they were trying to keep logging trucks from getting into the forest, or whether it was the use of pepper spray by police to go after non-violent protestors.

We saw it in Zuccotti and it’s similar to the WTO protests and a number of other places in the 90s in the film. And what’s been interesting is when the film came out in the theaters this summer, it was a couple of months before the Occupy movement had started, and a lot of people kind of saw protest movements in the United States as a quaint historical event. There was no discussion of a current protest movement about to happen. And as soon as it happened it really seemed to follow the playbook, and I feel like the film could be a cautionary tale both for activists to consider the types of tactics that they’re engaging in, and also for law enforcement to think about how they’re reacting to activists because I think there are some responses to activism that radicalize people and other responses that bring people into the democratic argument.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is Curry’s second Academy Award nomination. His first was in 2005 for Street Fight, a profile of a mayoral race in Newark, NJ.

Curry was a Comparative Religion major at Swarthmore. Just to show you what it takes to become an Oscar nominated filmmaker.

If A Tree Falls is distributed by Oscilloscope Pictures, which also distributes Meek’s Cutoff, Wendy and Lucy and Howl.

I hereby claim If A Tree Falls: A Story Of The Earth Liberation Front as an Oregon film, on the basis of location shooting, and on the basis of the inspiration provided by Oregon forests, which impelled McGowan to take the journey Curry documented.

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If A Tree Falls is an Oregon film by virtue of subject matter and location.

For Oscar nominated films which have Oregon directors and/or are based on work by Oregon authors: See this Handy Guide

For Oscar nominated animation by Oregon artists, including three Oscar winning Oregonians: See this Handy Guide