Watching Weird Films in a Former Fireboat Station on the Willamette
A still from Sarah Turner’s But You’re a Dolphin, part of Boathouse Microcinema’s March 12 screening.
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Portland teems with cool places to watch movies. We have historic movie palaces with majestic facades, neighborhood cinemas with neon marquees, and porn theaters reborn as candy-colored art houses. And, after a pandemic-induced hiatus, we again have a century-old former fireboat station on the banks of the Willamette River in an industrial patch of North Portland. This is Boathouse Microcinema, which in 2017 began squeezing a few dozen people onto mismatched sofas and chairs for screenings of local, independent work. The brainchild of filmmaker Matt McCormick and video artist Chris Freeman, the programming was experimental, often weird. Filmmakers were always in attendance, and they usually took questions from the audience. It was, as former Portland Monthly editor Fiona McCann wrote in a 2017 story, “kind of living-room-meets-art-house, with McCormick’s own black velvet art collection on one wall to help absorb sound.”
On Wednesday, March 12, Boathouse is back, kicking off with a group screening titled Assembly Cut. McCormick, a longtime pillar of Portland’s film community, has stepped out of a leadership role, but Freeman is staying on, and is joined by filmmaker Bryan Boyce. The two are committed to a spring season of programs—all free, unlike the last time around—featuring work by both established Portland filmmakers (March 15 brings a program by McCormick) and those newer to the scene. “I want to be a place where we can nurture especially younger folks,” Boyce told Willamette Week’s Andrew Jankowski.
I attended a handful of Boathouse screenings in those earlier years, and they were a scrappy, convivial blast. I wish I could recall more of what I saw on the screen—experimental film has a way of washing over me, leaving no residue—but I know the room buzzed with life. To WW, Freeman said “it might be a little chaotic” as they pull operations back together for the spring season. To which I say: Bring it on.
More Things to Do This Week
Music Women in Jazz
Various times Thu–Sun, Mar 6–9 | the 1905, $20–30
Crate Digging Respected LadyLand Dance Party
8pm–midnight Sat, Mar 8 | World Famous Kenton Club, $10–20
Keep the music by women going at this dance party hosted by Shannon Wiberg, a.k.a. DJ Action Slacks, whose Respected LadyLand radio show airs every Saturday on XRAY.fm. Wiberg spins mostly vinyl 45s, along the way dispensing stories of lesser-known women in the music industry—both the performers and those behind the scenes. The night’s party will move in roughly chronological fashion, with tunes from the 1950s and ’60s from 8–10pm, and mostly ’60s and ’70s music from 10pm–midnight.
books Karen Russell
7pm tue, Mar 11 | powell’s city of books, free
Rejoice: Portland-based author and MacArthur “genius grant” recipient Karen Russell has published her first novel since 2012’s Swamplandia! earned her a Pulitzer nomination. Set in a Dust Bowl–ravaged town in Nebraska, The Antidote follows a discrepant cast of characters—a Polish wheat farmer, a Black woman working as a WPA photographer, a “prairie witch”—whose stories become intertwined. “The caustic nature of memory and secrets seizes Russell’s fascination,” writes Lauren LeBlanc in an LA Times review, calling the new book even more ambitious than Swamplandia!
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