OREGON FILM
The Journal of Short Film, Vol. 11
2008
Shorts Compilation
http://store.thejsf.org/volume11.html
Review by Matthew Korfhage
Makers of film shorts don't get it easy. In order to have their work seen by anybody who didn't stroll into a screening on just the right day, directors are forced to continually flog their short films at festival after festival, and submit it to board after board, in order to slowly put together an audience for their hard work.
Well, maybe that's part of the fun. When the odds are stacked against you, success is all the more sweet, the audience response just that much more appreciated. But the odds are also stacked, sadly, against the interested viewer.
In 2005, though, Karl Mechem conceived of The Journal of Short Film (available at , a quarterly DVD compilation of film shorts. It's pretty much like a literary journal, but for film. It's truly amazing nobody ever thought of it before, but they didn't. In essence, the Journal functions as an antidote for a sorely lacking distribution system for film shorts, a line of connection between filmmakers and their natural audience.
Issue 11 of the Journal puts the focus on Portland, with 26 shorts from local directors, ranging from post-Brakhage experiments in sound and texture--like Cat Tyc's stellar "Furness", which renders a tremeloed Rocketship song into a shimmering, abstract visual analogue—to more narrative works such as Arman Bohn's "Planet Earth: A Response" which tells its story from the point of view of an alien robot probe.
Many of the pieces in the Journal do what only shorts can: create a lingering feeling untattached to any kind of story—generally a requirement for longer pictures—allow the viewer briefly into some different space or different way of seeing, before quickly receding. Matt McCormick's "50 Years Later", to plaintive soundtrack and no voiceover, simply juxtaposes old family videos of a Midwestern highway amusement spot with footage of the site's current dilapidated state. But because of the lushness of the color and the impressiveness of the landscape, the new footage shows not failure but the endurance of now-long -gone life in the objects that were left behind. The film is one of the highlights of the collection.
Other high points include Chris Lael Larson's "To Remember That Our Skies Are the Same Skies" which with painted-on film (or digital editing) outstrips its own simple concept to achieve a brief feeling of transcendence, and Jesse England's "Stevie Winwood is Hungry for Breakfast", which discovers hidden (and hilariously banal) messages about toast and sausage in backwards Stevie Winwood songs. And "Keith", by Ethan Stroum, is a well-edited portrait of a homeless man, and it's compelling enough that it almost seems that the short could be a teaser for a feature-length documentary. With luck, that's what it is.
All together, this issue of the Journal provides a stirring portrait of the variety and quality of the Portland film scene, but it remains only a snapshot, and only a taste. I hope to see more compilations like it in the future.
A complete list of film and television productions produced in Oregon is available at http://www.oregonfilm.org/history
Was your commercially available film also shot in Oregon?
Submit a copy to OMPA for review:
901 SE Oak Ste 104
Portland, OR 97214
And don't forget a link to where people can buy it!