The only known film footage of Oregon author Richard Brautigan is in this fishing documentary which also features his buddies Thomas McGuane and Jim Harrison.

One missed opportunity to see Brautigan on film happened when fellow beat poet James Broughton shot scenes with him in San Francisco for The Bed (1968), but didn’t use them.

I hereby claim Tarpon as an Oregon film on the basis of the presence within it of Oregon author Richard Brautigan.

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.

Walt Curtis is the subject of one comic documentary and one serious documentary. He has appeared as an actor in films, has been portrayed by an actor in a film adaptation of one of his books, and has made films himself.

Born in Olympia, Washington and raised in Oregon City, he began writing poetry as a Portland State University student.  A partial bibliography of his works, compiled in 2008 by James Honsik, reveals a long career of steady productivity.

More information about this new documentary about Pulitzer Prize winning author Gary Snyder – raised in Portland – can be found here.

In 1959, Oregon asked Portland filmmaker and adman Homer Groening to orchestrate the statewide celebration of the centennial of statehood. One teenager who remembers being hired by Groening to hand out brochures for the celebration grew up to be the poet Barbara Drake. In the picture above, she is the first on the right.

In the picture below, she’s the one smack dab in the middle.

Barbara Drake’s most recent book of poetry, Driving One Hundred, was published in 2009 by Windfall Press. Other books of poetry include What We Say to Strangers, Love at the Egyptian Theatre, Life in a Gothic Novel, Bees in Wet Weather, and Small Favors. She is also the author of Writing Poetry, widely used as a college textbook, and Peace at Heart: an Oregon Country Life, a memoir, which was an Oregon Book Award finalist in 1999. Born in Kansas, she moved with her parents to Oregon as a small child and grew up in Coos Bay. She earned her B.A. and M.F.A. degrees from the University of Oregon, and subsequently lived in Michigan for sixteen years where she taught at Michigan State University before returning to Oregon to teach at Linfield College, from 1983 until her recent retirement. The author and her husband live on a small farm in the foothills of the Oregon Coast Range.

From the bio of Drake on the Mountain Writers website.

Maybe Oregon artists are especially good at passing their gifts down to their children. Homer Groening’s son Matt followed him into show business, while Barbara Drake’s daughter Monica followed her into literature.

Barbara has another connection to Oregon film. She told me  she loved animated films so much that once she took a class at Northwest Film Center so she could make one of her own. She shot her drawings in sequence, just as instructed,  and took the film to be developed. Unfortunately she forgot to tell the lab to print each frame 12 times. When she got the film back the images flew past so fast no human eye could decipher them.

I suppose Barbara’s film is still there, waiting to be seen by super gifted people in the future who can see  images that pass really, really fast. That was her only attempt at filmmaking, and she was philosophical about it. Maybe she turned it into a poem.

Sabrina Guitart met Walt Curtis at a poetry reading, and their spontaneous combustion of artistic kinship resulted in Salmon Poet, in which  ”A poet from Oregon and a filmmaker from Barcelona evoke the spiritual journey of the salmon.”

Guitart was born in Paris, grew up in Barcelona, and graduated from Pacific University in 2000. She was working both as a still photographer and as a cinematographer when she met Curtis and they decided together to work on a film which would examine how the Oregon landscape had influenced his work, and hers.

I hereby claim Salmon Poet as an Oregon film.

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