By Alex Peterson

Stage frightened video artist/collector Melody Owen has the best collection of short experimental work that I’ve seen at a Portland film festival all year. That may seem like a lot of qualifying, but this city has a helluva lot of film festivals (despite, or because of, the fact that it’s much better known for its music scene.) Just this year I saw each of the PDX Film Fest’s shorts programs at the Clinton Street, I got to view the screener but did not attend the 35th Northwest Film and Video Fest and I could even throw in the incredibly awesome TrailerWars presentation that Dan Halstead hosted at the Hollywood a few months back. Each lovingly curated one had interesting stuff, but Melody Owen’s eighty-minute program seems a personal mix-tape of video art: it flows, peaks, crests and shocks the best.

    Ms. Owen has divided (curated) her collection of shorts into two reels. The first is called circles and spinning wheels. It’s a 50-minute pleasure ride through more than a dozen videos centered around the idea and/or shape of the circle. Owing to the wide range of styles and media – some films were entirely digital, conceived, created and finished within a computer, and some showed human beings doing human being stuff – the recurrence of the circle motif through each film cut a wide swath across the program.
    My favorite short experimental films tend to be formalist -  somehow playing with the rules and construction of the medium itself -  rather than realist (it’s incredibly difficult to convey something real about people in such a short amount of time.) The work that stuck out in circles and spinning wheels reflected none other than this preference.
    German Peter William Holden’s AutoGene is a filmed installation in which a perfect circle of umbrellas have been rigged mechanically to open and shut on command. The circle is filmed from directly above as the umbrellas are made to open and shut as a choreographed dance to the tune of Gene Kelly’s Singin' in the Rain. Holden’s photography of this ingenious installation didn’t reveal the method of producing the overhead umbrella image (that is, that they were all mechanically connected) until far into the 5-minute film. Most of the time I tried to figure out whether the umbrellas were animated or simply shot in a pristine light. Whatever choreographed pneumatic umbrellas mean is wide open, but this film is lovely to watch.
    The denouement of circles and spinning wheels was New Yorker Cassandra C. Jones’ Eventide, an incredibly painstaking succession of still photographs cut into a video flip-book. The subject of each photo, a perfectly circular sun, always occupies the same space on the screen. Orson Welles produced this effect in the opening sequence of Citizen Kane: dissolving ever-closer shots of Kane’s Xanadu palace so that the light of a bedroom window is always in the same place. Jones’ sun appeared in over three hundred (I’d guess) disparate photographs, sinking almost imperceptibly down the horizon. Again, if you like this kind of formal experiment in the first place, you’ll be mezmerized by this kind of work. Even if you don’t, it’s worth a look.
    The second reel is titled If I Could Crowd All My Souls Into That Mountain. It’s theme is artists and filmmakers who put themselves in front of their own cameras. The key to these was honesty and candidness.
    Along those lines, none were as impressive as Portlander/Rush-N-Disco performer Alicia McDaid’s Pain Is Fear Leaving Your Body (the video you see up at the top is a truncated version of that film.) McDaid mixed footage of her apparently irrepressible need to dress up in wacked-out clothing and dance to pop songs with frighteningly close shots of her face as she confessed to having no idea why she is compelled to do this, or how she is ever supposed to feel normal. As far as revealing your true self through film goes, McDaid is as fearless as anyone I’ve ever seen.
The program, and T:BA, are over, but if you’re interested in video art and these come across your path, grab them:
    Alicia McDaid, Pain is Fear Leaving the Body
    Ma Quisha, Must Be Beauty (in which the artist performs obscentities with over-the-counter beauty products)
    Liz Haley, Weathergirl 1 (another Portlander, more heartfelt sincerity)