Portland hardly runs the risk of cinematic overexposure, but when we see real a Portland movie, one with a sense of place, we remember it. These run the gamut from the 1950s noir morality play Portland Exposé and nuclear-strike preparedness special A Day Called X to Penny Allen’s 1978 land-use satire Property to the work of such Portland auteurs as Gus van Sant, Kelly Reichardt, and Aaron Katz — not to mention the unerotic erotic thriller Body of Evidence, the pseudoscientific docudrama What the Bleep Do We Know!?, and B-movie master Albert Pyun’s Andrew Dice Clay vehicle Brain Smasher… a Love Story. All of them take the elements of Portland’s urban space — the bridges, the MAX trains, Big Pink, the woods just outside the city — to constitute a fascinating body of modern Portland urban cinema.

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