Dec. 7 & 8
7:30 p.m.
Clinton Street Theater
2522 Southeast Clinton Street
Portland, OR 97202

Hosted by: Cinema Project

For their last screening for 2010, Portland’s Cinema Project celebrates the art of melodrama with a selection of both new and classic underground films and videos curated by Cinema Project‘s co-founder Pablo De Ocampo.

Each of the five short films selected all “pursue the melodramatic and use it as the basis for exploring cinematic narrative,” according to De Ocampo. However, stylistically, the films couldn’t be more different.

The films range from Bruce Baillie‘s actor-less, single-take left-ward pan All My Life (1966) to the disconnected couple in Keren Cytter’s Four Seasons (2009) to Ming Wong’s Angst Essen / Eat Fear (2008), a recasting of Fassbinder’s Ali, Fear Eats the Soul; to Laida Lertxundi‘s desert-set Footnotes to a House of Love (2007) to George Kuchar‘s short musical Pussy on a Hot Tin Roof (1961).

(Brief note: Cinema Project lists George Kuchar as the sole director of Pussy on a Hot Tin Roof, but many sources claim it’s co-directed with his twin brother Mike Kuchar.)

The list of films screening, with technical details for each, is below:

All My Life, dir. Bruce Baillie [1966, 16mm, 3 min.]
Footnotes to a House of Love, dir. Laida Lertxundi [USA/Spain, 2007, 16mm, 13 min.]
Four Seasons, dir. Keren Cytter [Israel, 2009, video, 12 min.]
Angst Essen / Eat Fear, dir. Ming Wong [Singapore, 2008, video, 27 min.]
Pussy on a Hot Tin Roof, dir. George Kuchar [1961, 16mm, 4 min.]