TBA:06 THE WORKS

OREGON DEPARTMENT OF KICK ASS

Follow Me to Certain Death

On September 11, the Oregon Department of Kick Ass presents an evening of films assembled by Vanessa Renwick which cast a meditative gaze on death in many forms. In Renwick's intense personal documentary work, edgy and grim poetry informs a deliberate and steady stare at extreme states of existence. Humans and other animals are forced to take decisive action. Everything is a matter of life and death.

Daniel Menche’s thundering live soundtrack propels her latest wildlife epic Hope and Prey. 9 is a Secret ponders mystical visitations from crows and ravens after Renwick changes her name. The found footage gem, Britton, S. Dakota is constructed solely of haunting portraits of children filmed standing in the street of a desolate town in depression era America. Also screening: two Vietnam era artifacts—Travis Wilkerson’s harrowing and hopeless National Archive, v. 1 and Bill Daniel’s Selective Service System Story, which revisits a filmmaker who shot himself in the foot on film to make a statement against the Vietnam War and to get out of the draft. The evening commences with Wilkerson’s Superior Elegy, a portrait of a 25 hour-long improvisational concert held in Duluth, Minnesota in honor of a murdered friend. Despite being scheduled for the weekend following September 11, 2001, the event’s organizers chose to perform as planned. In so doing, the event acquired an unintended poignancy. The resulting film reads almost like a prayer: quiet, formal, and full of inexplicable power.