Fall 2015

We’re excited to announce that our fall 2015 season features an almost entirely female roster of filmmakers. That this occurred organically and effortlessly means a lot to us and that Cinema Project is continuing to meet its mission head-on: to promote public awareness of avant-garde cinema to Portland audiences and to highlight work that is underrepresented. There are a few artists that we’ve had on our list for a while (Joyce Wieland, Anne Robertson, Barbara Rubin) and other contemporary filmmakers who serendipitously fit right in for fall (Margaret Rorison, Pam Minty, Nathalie Nambot).

Even if you are not familiar with the name of Canadian artist Joyce Wieland, you have likely heard of her former husband, Michael Snow. It is worth noting that in 1971 Wieland was the first woman to have a solo exhibit (called True Patriot Love) at the National Gallery of Canada. While she left a cohesive body of work in various media, it is really only her films that she is known for outside of Canada. The timing for us to finally screen her work, including some lesser-known films, was inspired by the exhibition this fall of Portland-based multi-media artist Jessica Jackson Hutchins, entitled Confessions, at the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, and the lumber room. Hutchins’ work shares a similar spirit and format to some of Wieland’s painting and fiber arts pieces. Please visit reed.edu/gallery and lumberroom.com to learn more.

The name Anne Robertson has also been hovering in the air recently, specifically via the films of past Cinema Project guest and one of avant-garde cinema’s spiritual leaders Saul Levine. In his Falling Notes Unleaving (2013), which we screened this past June, are images of Robertson’s funeral along with footage from Levine’s 2012 visit to Portland. Thanks to our guests from the Harvard Film Archive, where Robertson’s collection of films is housed and maintained, we’ll have experts in attendance to guide us in exploring her work and life. Our parting gift to close the season will be the 1963 expanded cinema masterpiece Christmas on Earth by the then young and enterprising Barbara Rubin without whom Warhol may have not met the Velvet Underground or the NYC counterculture of the 1960s may have not been so explosive, prominent… It will be a celebration of bodies, free love, and celluloid.

“Who run the world? Girls.”—Beyoncé

See you at the cinema.

Mia Ferm, Heather Lane, Melinda Kowalska, Michael McManus, and volunteers Melina Coumas and Enrique Fuentes-Lungo