DeComposer
2003
curated by Vanessa Renwick and Bill Daniel
The Hollywood Theatre, The Mercury, Blackbird,
and The Oregon Department of Kick Ass present:
DeComposer
Film and Music series
Re-Themed Soundtracks For Forgotten Films Composed and Performed Live by West Coast Musicians
...somewhere between the typical melodramatic orchestral accompaniment to silent dramatic narratives that carried the infant cinema from its birth, and the familiar contemporary practice of experimental video projections that play behind bands in a club setting, is the DeComposer experience...
This 3-event series features local bands and musicians (including groups from San Francisco and Seattle) playing live to screenings of bizarre and unlikely film oddities. DeComposer creates an epic-experimental film/music experience on the Hollywood Theater's mammoth screen by employing "radical juxtaposition' and other lyrical, absurdist and cheap techniques in pairing musicians and films. The idea is to set up collaboration between film programmers and musicians to mess with the possibilities of combining film and live music in the majestic setting of the Hollywood's vaudville-era main theater.
Fri May 9 Valet, the distance formula , Jupiter
Fri May 16 Quasi, Hans Grusel's Krankenkabinet (SanFrancisco),
Daniel Menche, and Sleater Kinney
Fri May 23 The Black Cat Orchestra (Seattle), The Sensualists,
The Topiary Kings
$10 per night, $25 for all three shows
Doors at 10:30, shows start promptly at 11:00
Refreshments by Blackbird
Hollywood Theatre 4122 NE Sandy Blvd
DeComposer is a fund-raising event for Vanessa Renwick's new film; CRITTER, a 16mm, 50 min, documentary essay on the gray wolf's re-introduction into the West. The Oregon Film and Video Foundation (operators of the Hollywood Theatre) is the non-profit sponsor for the CRITTER project.
Film programming by Bill Daniel and Vanessa Renwick. Selections from the film collections of Dennis Nyback of the Clinton Street Theater, Craig Baldwin of San Francisco's Other Cinema, Rick Prelinger of The Prelinger Archives, c Bill Daniel of Funhouse Cinema and Tom Robinson of Photo Image Archive.com
The films run a range from vintage industrials, home movies, 70's dystopian future projections, some commercial kitsch, ecological and social disasters, and include many unclassifiable gems such as 1920's plastics lab footage, a kids film depicting a gruesome fight scene between a horse and a bear, a home-made puppet film explaining the solar system, a hideous/hilarious and unrelenting Oscar Mayer lunch meat promotional film, and other underground artifacts. Most of the material will be projected film, with some, but not much, projected video. Many of the sets will feature multiple projectors, as we test the capacity of the Hollywood's electrical box. Valet will accompany their own video pieces, and The Distance Formula and The Sensualists will be performing some of their own original films as well as "found" films.