SELFLESS Makers the Pander Brothers Sign Graphic Novels at TRUE BELIEVERS COMICS Tomorrow Afternoon

The Pander Bros discuss their new film SELFLESS


SELFLESS screened to a full house yesterday, and prompted a lively Q&A after the show. Tomorrow, Saturday, SELFLESS screens at 9:15pm at the Santa Fe Film Center, 1616 St. Michael's Drive. We hope you'll join us then for the final screening of SELFLESS at the Santa Fe Film Festival.



The brothers will be guests for an in-store signing of their graphic novels at TRUE BELIEVERS COMICS, Saturday, Dec 6th from 12pm to 3pm. 801 Cerrillos Rd., STE B, Santa Fe, NM (505) 922-8783

While still in their teens, the Pander Bros. helped forge the independent comics revolution with their high-style artwork that pushed the boundaries of the medium on such breakout series as GRENDEL: Devil’s Legacy and Triple X. The legendary artists behind 65 books to date, their portfolio includes three graphic novels, ten series, and 15 stand-alone issues for such major publishers as Marvel, DC Comics and Dark Horse. They’ve also served as the creators and writers of Batman: City of Light and Batman: Apocalypse Girl, and most recently their new graphic novel, ACCELERATE, published by Image Comics.



The Panders Bros.’ work in film includes 15 music videos (seven of them for Palm Pictures); the concept for Gus Van Sant’s “Runaway” video for Deee-Lite; the award-winning cult classic, “The Operation”; the feature-length documentary, “Painted Life”; and a series of shorts.

The sons of prominent Northwest painter Henk Pander, who emigrated to the U.S. from the Netherlands in the 1960s, and a mother who received her masters degree in fine arts, the brothers were encouraged to explore their creativity from the time they could hold a crayon. As kids, they were back-stage regulars at Portland’s landmark Storefront Theater, where their father designed installations and stage sets. By their preteens, Arnold was consumed with drawing ‘superheroes’ and Jacob, though equally gifted with a pen and brush, was already plotting out his first movie, inspired by such late night TV serials as “Flash Gordon.”



Their first 8mm film, “War is Hell,” was directed by Jacob at age 12, and starred Arnold, 10, as an ambushed soldier. (To his teacher’s horror, Jacob poked holes through the film stock to create the illusion of gun fire flashes.) Their first 16mm film, “Time Gate,” two years later, found Arnold stranded in an apocalyptic future. Their first pen-and-paper collaboration, around the same time, was the comic strip, Gamma World, which ran in their high school newspaper. Their first after-school jobs were in the Future Dreams comic book store (Arnold) and at a local art house theater (Jacob).

Indeed, it was as a result of Arnold leaving one his drawings behind at Future Dreams, when he quit the job, that their first big break came only a year out of high school. Popular comic book author Matt Wagner spotted it and had Comico sign them to create the covers and inside illustrations for his GRENDEL: Devil’s Legacy series. Overnight, they went from “selling Christmas cards out of our shoulder bags” to being able to afford a trip to the family homeland when it was over. The 12-issue series set a new sales record for an independent comic book (on a par with Marvel and DC Comics), merited nominations for the coveted Eisner and Manning Awards, and scored the industry’s top fans-choice award for the duo.



While working on the 4-issue mini-series, Ginger Fox, for Comico, the brothers spent much of the next two years in Amsterdam, developing their own monumental work, Triple X, published by Dark Horse Comics in the mid-1990s.

The futuristic 7-issue series and its 1997 graphic novel were hailed by critics on both sides of the Atlantic. Among them, Huh Magazine in the U.K. called Triple X “a global comic book piece de resistance…It reads like an illustrated James Bond novel…The brothers’ previous work inspired a bunch of well-deserved acclaim, but nothing quite matches the cinematic scope utilized throughout XXX. This ain’t your typical comic. It actively engages the reader in the story, making it something of an interactive comic adventure.” Spin magazine labeled it “a wild agitpop thriller,” and Anodyne declared: “When it was all said and done, Triple X challenged people’s perceptions of what comics could be.”

Among other notable projects, the Pander Bros. created the groundbreaking “Secret Broadcast” comic book/companion audio CD tribute to renegade radio. Designed to function as a soundtrack to its published counterpart, the album featured tracks from such artists as reggae-rapper Jamal-Ski, DJ and musician Zeb, hip hop electronica artist Supersoul, and producer/songwriter Mark Pistel. With the Dark Horse mini-series, Exquisite Corpse, the first comic book designed to be read in any order, they were thrust into the middle of an international controversy, when it was banned in several countries.



After studying 16mm filmmaking at the Northwest Film & Video Center and serving as an apprentice editor on the 35mm feature, “Shadow Play,” Jacob launched his professional career in the 1990s with a series of shorts infused with rebellious humor. Among them, “The Spirit of 76” featured painter and sculptor Tom Cramer, whose volatile and unpredictable interview style keeps the viewer on constant edge as the artist probes the meaning and American zeitgeist of the early 1990s ; “Media Hijack” was a 20-minute visual narrative blending repurchased media images and sound; and “The Other Side of the Tracks” chronicled a day in the life of three heroin addicts.

In 1992, Jacob was hired by Frontier Records to shoot his first music video, “Light in You,” for Dharma Bums, which received extensive play on MTV. Among the others, the brothers conceived, directed and produced Hitting Birth’s “Drive On,” the winner of the Oregon Cascade Award, and the half-hour concept film, “Suck it and See,” for Palm Pictures, which featured such international electronic artists as Howie B., Fantastic Plastic Machine, Spacer, and DJ Miku.

In 2002, Jacob’s “Painted Life” provided a riveting look into the creative process behind his father’s internationally-celebrated work in still lifes. Filmed over a period of seven years and funded in part by a grant from the Oregon Arts Commission, the feature-length documentary became an official selection of the Northwest Film Festival and was screened at Seattle’s prestigious Fry Art Museum.



Long fixtures on Portland’s cultural scene, the brothers co-founded the landmark FUSE Gallery during the 1990s. Patterned loosely on Andy Warhol’s Factory, the non-profit collective of art studios was a showcase for eclectic, artist-driven dance, theater, and alternative music and film events. Among them, Gus Van Sant premiered his short film, “God Bless America,” written by and starring William S. Burroughs.

As fine artists, they also frequently exhibit at one of the city’s leading venues, the Mark Woolley Gallery. Jacob has also shown in New York – when a collaborative media installation he produced with noted experimental filmmaker Steve Doughton, featuring music by acclaimed electronica artist Aphex Twin, was mounted at the Mary Ann Boesky Gallery in Soho.

Kassim the Dream

Kassim the Dream comes to SFFF as part of the American Film Institute Project 20/20. A documentary, the film tells the story of Kassim "The Dream" Ouma, his past as a child-soldier in Uganda, his success story as a professional boxer in the United States, and his trip back to Africa. You can imagine the clichés a story like this could throw up and the sensationalist and exploitive tack a filmmaker could take, but I can assure you, you can't imagine the graceful balance of humor and sincere emotion with which filmmaker Kief Davidson succeeds in this project.

The film is well made. It knows when to pause and it knows when to party. It stays really funny, really serious, really adorable, and really sad without ever crossing into excess, an accomplishment that evidences the hard work and smart decision-making behind this film. Shifting from eloquent footage symbolic of Kassim's past, to professional boxing matches, to Kassim and his family, to interviews with boxing experts and Kassim's closest friends, to Kassim's return to Uganda, Davidson's work manages a number of different aesthetic and emotional demands quite seamlessly and maintains the spirit of the film. This spirit, as Davidson himself acknowledged in a post-screening Q&A, is Kassim's. And really, this is where the heart of the film lovingly rests. Kassim is magnetic. Through much of the film, he smiles a smile that made me sure I was right there with him laughing at his kids' Cuteness (that's a capital 'C') and sharing in his joy. He's a professional boxer and an ex-child-soldier, two worlds that--in obviously quite different ways--breed violence and one-track minds, yet Kassim persists in his complicated existence: he tears up at a devastating loss in the ring; he winces and squirms as his hair is tugged and braided; he believes in the choices he has made; he opens himself up to the emotional reality of his past and present with a courage and commitment I can't begin to describe here.

Above all, this is one of the most viscerally and joyfully engaging movies I've seen in a while. Kassim's love for life is too beautiful and the tragedy beneath everything is too overwhelming for this film not to make an impact. There was a moment in this film, after Kassim has faced head-on the terror of his past and the Uganda he left behind, where Kassim gives a glance and a strained sigh that showed me grief complete and brought me very near a feared edge. I imagine anyone could find a moment of that magnitude in this film.

Las Meninas: A Poetry from "Mirror" in Mirrors

Yesterday was wild fun. My afternoon started with Las Meninas, a film that hails from Ukraine and, more specifically, from the mind of painter Igor Podolchak and cinematographer Svetlana Makarenko. It's a disturbing poem that communicates a world of immense claustrophobia, darkness, anxiety, and hyper-aurality inspired, it seems, by both Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror and 18th-century still-life painting. While I can't speak much on behalf of the latter--except for the film's fascination with food on plates, grapes and other fruit in bowls, table-settings and especially silverware, clothing, fabrics, and the stylized lounging of women--I can comment on a few of the ways this film evokes Tarkovsky's vision in Mirror.

For one, Las Meninas takes in interest in how sound and images constitute one another. The sound of a fork scratching a plate is pushed to unbearable heights; voices and words layer and repeat; falling sugar cubes hit the ground with the sound of shattering glass; the sounds of opening a cabinet or closing a door are just amiss from their corresponding visual component. Through such an active and unpredictable auditory world, Podolchak not only gives us the chance to examine the relationship between sound and image but also meditates on the idea of silence and how it breaks.

This film also moves like Mirror in its constant linking of ideas and people through very physical substances and elements--water, urine, hair, metals, grapes--and more abstract threads--words, camera angles, colors. Further, these people live in a house of mirrors, windows, and other framing devices. They are perpetually not only themselves, but their reflection, the reflection of their reflections, reflections of objects in the house, and of each other. The most enjoyable part of this film for me was the commitment of the camera to interact with these mirror images in ever more clever ways. For about 10 minutes, all of the action takes place in a mirror on a far wall. We see people move in and out of this frame but the large and luxurious room around it remains inanimate. After a time, we begin to see only this mirror; even though it is reduced to about 1/16th of the "real" cinema screen, it holds the moving images and so we start to conceive of it as the movie. We fall into this illusion of these mirror images so deeply that it's a bit startling when the outer world of the "real life" room begins to interact with the mirror/mini-cinema screen. These moments (of which there are many) when the house of mirrors, or the clever drift or zoom of the camera, or a play with light and darkness create insightful illusions are spectacular, but the film never reaches the dramatic heights and beauty that make something like Mirror so utterly mind-blowing (see video below). But, I realize that's like saying this review doesn't quite hit the mark André Bazin, or Pauline Kael, or J. Hoberman would have.

My only real complaint with Las Meninas was its rather grotesque treatment of the female body. The film renders all sexuality rather disgusting, a choice which adds to the effective and well-crafted discomfort of a lot of this film, but the men seem to at least be in charge of their grotesque behavior whereas the women are subject to A TON of skirt lifting and physical violation by male figures, including a difficult-to-stomach fetishization of the straps and girdles that keep them all locked up. Not to mention that many of the (crotch) shots put the viewer in a voyeuristic position, leaving me feeling not a little violated. One woman leaving the theater exclaimed, "I just kept crossing my legs!" So that's something to think about when watching this movie. But yes, go see this movie! And most especially do so if you're willing to abandon any taste for narrative in order to check out how Tarkovsky's ideas live on through Podolchak, Makarchak, and contemporary Ukrainian cinema.