AMIA in Portland

We want to invite the Portland community to participate in AMIA activities!

Five sessions from today’s No Islands In This Stream: Building, Maintaining and Sharing Regional and Community Archives program stream will be live streamed throughout the day. 

5:30PM – 7:15PM – NW Film Center
Screening:  Santo Contra El Cerebro del Mal (1959/1961)

SANTO CONTRA EL CEREBRO DEL MAL (SANTO VS. THE EVIL BRAIN) is the second of two Mexico-Cuba co-productions released – but the first to be completed – after Castro came to power in Cuba, and the filmmakers were forced to flee the country prematurely (with the unprocessed 35mm negative being smuggled out inside a coffin). The aborted shooting schedule meant that sequences had to be “lifted” from each film to fill holes in the other, by necessity. Both of these two films, which represent the very first time that the famous El Santo character appeared on the big screen, have not been available in any acceptable quality prints since initial release. In 2017, the Permanencia Voluntaria archive’s Viviana Garcia Besné in Tepoztlán, Mexico, working in collaboration with Nicolas Winding Refn and the Academy Film Archive, set out to completely restore the films from their rapidly-deteriorating original camera negatives.

10:00AM – 4:00PM – pAVilion
Community AV Archiving Fair presented by Community Archiving Workshop

Join us for an all-day Community AV Archiving Fair! Independent media makers, collecting institutions, and community groups in the Portland area will be invited to bring their challenges, their media objects, and their data for a day of collaborative problem solving and skill-sharing with the AMIA community. The fair is organized around a number of “stations,” each of which will be staffed by AMIA volunteers, and focus on a particular workflow, technique, or tool. Stations will include: Film Inspection, Analog Inventory Techniques, Digitization, Prioritizing & Preparing Media for Digitization, Post-digitization File Management & Storage, Disaster Preparedness & Recovery, and Digital Preservation. AMIA conference attendees are invited to sign up to assist at a station or to propose their own stations or join stations to expand their own knowledge-base.

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2:00PM – NW Film Center
Screening:  Detour (1945)

From the gutters of Poverty Row came a movie that, perhaps more than any other, epitomizes the dark fatalism at the heart of film noir. As he hitchhikes his way from New York to Los Angeles, a down-on-his-luck nightclub pianist (Tom Neal) finds himself with a dead body on his hands and nowhere to run—a waking nightmare that goes from bad to worse when he picks up the most vicious femme fatale in cinema history, Ann Savage’s snarling, monstrously conniving drifter Vera. Working with no-name stars on a bargain-basement budget, B auteur Edgar G. Ulmer turned threadbare production values and seedy, low-rent atmosphere into indelible pulp poetry. Long available only in substandard public domain prints, Detour haunts anew in its first major restoration.  Restored by the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation in collaboration with Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Cinémathèque Française. Restoration funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation.  Film provided by Janus Films.

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4:30PM – NW Film Center
Screening:  The Juniper Tree

Set in medieval Iceland, The Juniper Tree follows Margit (Björk in a riveting performance) and her older sister Katla (Bryndis Petra Bragadottir) as they flee for safety after their mother is burned to death for witchcraft. Finding shelter and protection with Johan (Valdimar Orn Fygenring), and his resentful young son, Jonas (Geirlaug Sunna Pormar), the sisters help form an impromptu family unit that’s soon strained by Katla’s burgeoning sorcery. Photographed entirely on location in the stunning landscapes of Iceland in spectacular black-and-white by Randy Sellars, The Juniper Tree is a deeply atmospheric film, evocative of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Day of Wrath and Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, and filled with indelible waking dream sequences (courtesy of legendary experimental filmmaker Pat O’Neill). A potent allegory for misogyny and its attendant tragedies, The Juniper Tree is a major rediscovery for art house audiences. The Juniper Tree was restored in 2018 by the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research and The Film Foundation, with funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation.