Bellevue Film Festival gets new life

E-mail this article Print this article

"Have a film festival," said writer and former Seattle Times critic Tom Robbins, "and give a big prize."

On his advice, Mary Jo Malone and the late Carol Duke did exactly that, creating the Bellevue Film Festival in the summer of 1967. Within years, the festival's $1,000 grand prize (a hefty sum at the time) became the avant-garde equivalent of winning an Oscar, and the annual late-July festival turned into a nationally recognized showcase for experimental shorts. It lasted until 1981, when the chief venue, the Bel-Vue Theater, was torn down to make way for Bellevue Square.

As a way of reconnecting with the Eastside's artsy history, the Bellevue Art Museum is now reviving the festival. A program of former grand-prize winners, including Tom Palazzolo's "O" and the Evergreen State College classic "Eat the Sun," will be screened at 7 p.m. May 16. Traditionally held during the Bellevue Arts and Crafts Fair, the festival itself will return July 27-28. (Information about submissions: 425-519-0747.)

Earlier this week, the museum held a "Remember the Bellevue Film Festival Day," complete with appearances from such filmmakers and festival fans as Doris Chase, Karl Krogstad, Marv Newland and Paul Dorpat and one-time festival jurors John G. Hanhardt (from the 1977 festival) and Bill Foster (from 1979). People who hadn't seen each other for years, even decades, joked that their hair had turned "blond" while discussing retirement plans and clashing memories of how the festival got its start.

Hanhardt recalled how the festival was part of a national independent-film community, committed to transforming the mainstream media, linked by museums and universities and financed by vigorous federal support. He showed Panther White's delightful "33 Yo-Yo Tricks" (which delivers exactly what it promises) to suggest "how playful the avant-garde was at the time." He also screened more challenging "structural" films, such as Bruce Conner's "Crossroads," to demonstrate how filmmakers were "dealing with the medium itself."

Foster, the longtime director of Portland's Northwest Film Center, first attended "this improbable event" in the summer of 1974. In the midst of Bellevue's "very mainstream arts fair," he remembers crowds of outsiders filling "this commercial movie theater impounded for the event." He suspected that very few Bellevue people actually attended what was becoming "one of the key national showcases" for experimental shorts.

He screened the last of the festival's grand-prize winners, Newland's "Sing Beast Sing," an inventive piece that is now less familiar than Newland's "Bambi Meets Godzilla," a now-famous novelty cartoon which Foster described as "a film he has to live with." Newland was on hand to point out that "B Meets G" had its first commercial showings at Seattle's Harvard Exit. He also claimed that his Bellevue Film Festival prize got him the most extensive coverage he's ever had in Variety.

Dorpat showed footage from the Skyriver Rock Festivals which led to Bumbershoot, and called the prolific Krogstad "the Victor Hugo of independent films." Krogstad talked about sitting through hours of junk at the festival while "looking for the magic." For him, that included Bob Brown and Frank Olvey's locally produced "The Tempest" and David Lynch's "The Grandmother," which he described as "the color version of 'Eraserhead' " (the real "Eraserhead" was released several years later). He also admitted to hating Hollis Frampton's controversial 1971 grand-prize winner, ("Nostalgia"), even though he can't put out of his mind the 35-minute film's only image: photographs burning on a hot plate.

Krogstad felt that the festival "allowed the promise of filmmaking in America." Chase echoed that sentiment, acknowledging that she saw her first experimental films there. When she caught "The Tempest" there in 1968, she decided to become a filmmaker herself. She pointed out that of all the films shown in 14 years of the festival, 92 percent were directed by men. She added: "Things are changing now, I hope."

"Remember the Bellevue Film Festival Day" was first in a series of screenings, exhibits and public events, "Media Arts Histories Northwest," curated by Robin Oppenheimer, who introduced the guests and claimed that "this is an experiment, this is a laboratory." It was taped for eventual telecast.