Films of August

A number of very interesting films opening around Seattle this week. From North to South:

The film "Silence Before Bach" opens today at the Northwest Film Forum. Catalan film maker Pere Portabella made a name for himself by producing films by Carlos Saura (“The Delinquents,” 1959) and Luis Buñuel (the Franco-freaking “Viridiana,” 1961), and started making his own films in the late 1960s, at times in collaboration with other Catalan artists like Joan Miró. An intermittent fixture on the festival circuit, he received the first North American retrospective of his work in Chicago in 2006, with the Museum of Modern Art in New York following suit a year later. Through a series of seemingly disconnected set pieces "Silence Before Bach" considers J.S.Bach as a jumping-off point for different visual and aural ideas and associations, including the cross-cultural reality of European identity. Following Bach’s influence, the film bounces all over the map, crisscrossing the continent from Spain to Germany by way of various travelers, their harmonies and rhythms.

At the McLeod Residence, Gurldogg's favorite Film Maker/ D.J. /Screen Printer /Sculptor Rob Zverina is showing a collection of photographs and short films. The show is called "memory (w)hole." and will be on display until September 27. Rob carries his camera wherever he goes and shoots films daily that are anywhere from one to 30 seconds in length. He then selects the best clips, annotates them with descriptive keywords and logs the date, location, and subject of each micro-documentary in a process he’s dubbed "autobioanthropology." Today, August 1, Rob will turn into DJ Port-A-Party at the reception to spin 45's on a self-contained portable record player.

And the SIFF Cinema is showing "A Man Named Pearl" through August 7. The film tells the story of iconoclastic topiary artist Pearl Fryar from Bishopville, South Carolina. The film documents the prejudice that haunts Fryar, a black man in a predominantly white neighborhood, as he trims his bushes with such skill and vision that his home becomes a major tourist destination.

Ignore the sun this week! Watch movies instead!