Portland Film Festival Review: GRU-PDX

Sometimes, to really appreciate what you have, you have to view it through someone else’s eyes. GRU-PDX, which opens the third installation of the Portland Film Festival, is filmmaker Daniel Barosa‘s loving glimpse into Portland’s underground music scene, with all of its quirks. In 2013, the atmospheric indie rock duo Quatro Negro flew to Portland, Or. to make a record with The Helio Sequence. While GRU-PDX started out to document the record-making process, it quickly expanded outward to gaze at Portland’s music scene, both over- and under-ground, looking at the way it’s changed in the wake of the “Portlandia”-hype.

GRU-PDX talks to a staggering array of Portland musicians, across multiple eras and genres, as well as featuring numerous live performances, shot in and around our fair City Of Bridges, record stores, house shows, and the show Into The Woods. The issues tackled in GRU-PDX illustrate the issues that have been plaguing the entire globe, and particularly the music industry, in microcosm. Covering the usual laundry list of topics, from gentrification to declining album sales, to the rising cost of gasoline, GRU-PDX tackles, unflinchingly, exactly how difficult it is to even BE a musician in 2015, let alone make a living as a creative.

Although many of the long-standing Portland natives are pretty cynical of the New Seasons direction Portland is taking, and who can blame them, these shifts are reflective of what’s happening in all of the United States. Former economically depressed regions, like Detroit, for instance, are being billed as new cultural centers, for makers and developers. The bright and shiny hope of all millenials, where you can have it all, on the cheap.

Portland has held out longer than most, resisting the rising cost of living, due to a scarcity of jobs and outsider’s inherent fear of Vitamin D deprivation. Quite simply, you have to have what it takes, to make it here. As time marches forward, what it takes may be a BFA in finance or a graphic design degree. You might want to have a job lined up, before coming to Portland.

GRU-PDX is not all gloom-n-doom; quite the opposite, in fact. Daniel Barosa’s intent, with GRU-PDX, was to show the people who live here how good we’ve got it. I’d say he succeeded marvelously!

GRU-PDX is prevented from being just another talking heads documentary by copious amounts of grey, foggy, atmospheric b-roll from all over Portland, from the iconic St. John’s bridge, to Powell’s City Of Books, to the grey barren expanses of industrial NW.

While I, at times, like any other creative living and working in Portland, get kind of bitter at times, with the rising rent and cost of living, GRU-PDX re-instills my faith in this city, in its music, and the people who live here. You will fall in love, all over again, with the grey skies, the mist, the ancient and enigmatic forests. it’s a special place, when you embrace it and meet it on its own terms.

GRU-PDX talks to nearly every Portland musician you could imagine, outside of the huge huge huge names like Carrie Brownstein or Modest Mouse. Jackpot Records’ Larry Crane, a local recording legend, features predominantly, and his non-step energy and enthusiasm for the scene is electrifying! You will want to start a band or three, after watching GRU-PDX.

Candid talks with shining wunder-kids Radiation City, signed to local indie flagship Tender Loving Empire, is a more sobering affair. When I moved to Portland 5 years ago, Rad. City were the next big thing, in the wake of their mentors, Typhoon. Radiation City’s only just now started to make any money at all, on their first record, let alone any of the rest. It’s slightly chilling, when one of this city’s biggest band says, “I don’t know if I would’ve done it, if I know it would’ve been like this.”

Portland creatives, like artists everywhere, have a lot to contend with. Many bands talk, at great length, and sometimes balancing multiple jobs, while still playing in bands and touring.

The message, at the end of the day, if you want to “make it”, or make music at all, you have to really want it. You have to practice after working 10-hour days, as well as being your own management and press. It’s a pretty thankless task, but music fanatics couldn’t stop if they wanted to.

The most exciting thing about GRU-PDX, apart from seeing things most people who don’t live here ever get to see, is the stylistic difference of the bands. There’s indie rock, techno, hip-hop (which isn’t shown too much in the movie, unfortunately), metal, punk. The bands here are not trying to fit some image or mold. They’re doing their own thing, to the best of their ability.

This is the real emerald heart of Stumptown, in shadowy tandem to the hi-gloss stereotype of bespectacled hipsters. This is not to hate on people who move to Portland looking for a better life. That’s why we’re all here. It’s just the focus on the image, instead of the reality. This has always been kind of a funky, rundown, vaguely crazy place. We’re all starving, yet still unwilling to buckle down and get a corporate job. This is a city of people doing their own thing (often because we don’t have a choice. We couldn’t find a real job if we tried!)

For Portland artists, keep hanging in there and fighting the good fight! Trends come and go, and hopefully the housing bubble will burst, and we all won’t have to work 50 hours a week, just to survive. Hopefully, Portland won’t go the way of San Fransisco or New York. Except, inevitably, it will, as will everyplace else.

A sobering, yet ultimately inspiring, look at the market forces of globalization, gentrification, the haves and the have nots. The one thing we DO have, however, is great music in spades! Never forget it, and don’t take it for granted. GRU-PDX reminds us to support local music! (And maybe get a design degree.)