The Lonesome Crowded West

[April 9th, 2008]

Portland’s next great director was out on the road somewhere between here and Las Vegas, doing what he does best—filming clouds and abandoned motor lodges—when he realized he was alone.

“The wonderful thing about the way I’ve traditionally made films,” says Matt McCormick, who has been shooting experimental movies here for a decade, “is it’s really just me and my camera. You can find that great shot and wait for it—whether it’s just the rain, the weather, or the right train going by.” There’s just one problem, he says. “Doing this solo filmmaking, it can get kind of lonely.”

The loneliness that McCormick has endured while composing his brief, non-narrative movies is the same feeling his works have evoked—and it’s the reason why his is the Portland name you’ll soon be hearing bandied nationally around the arthouses and galleries where the cinéastes look for the next big thing. They’ll be saying what a lucky few Portlanders already know: Matt McCormick is something special.

In the city Gus Van Sant revealed as a concrete jungle and Todd Haynes used as a semiotic playground, McCormick is poised to debut his own solitary vision of recluses and grain elevators, telemarketers and empty swimming pools. He’s a third-shift moviemaker, a guy who notices the private moments of beauty that are typically reserved for the long-haul trucker or the parking-garage security guard. He notices the decaying industrial alleys of the city, the ones you might spot while taking a long walk in the Northeast neighborhoods—only he goes back with a camera, and he waits for the light to hit again in that limpid, effervescent way everyone else had half forgotten.

Maybe you already know about Matt McCormick. Maybe you’ve heard how he founded Peripheral Produce back in 1997, and how that film collective launched the career of Miranda July and established the PDX Film Fest as a destination for American experimental filmmakers. Perhaps you’ve seen his 2001 documentary The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal, and you recall how it gently razzed modern-art criticism and municipal cleanup projects. Or maybe you stood in a packed room at Holocene last year and watching a live band improvise a soundtrack to Future So Bright, McCormick’s scrapbook of rotting farmsteads and Route 66 attractions. But whether you’ve experienced all of these projects or are reading about McCormick for the first time, you shouldn’t miss his NW Film Center program Wednesday, April 9: It affords the privilege of witnessing an artist discovering the full range of his powers.

This June, McCormick will begin shooting his first feature-length movie, Some Days Are Better Than Others. In some ways, the project isn’t a departure—it has minimal plot, and it revolves around a building demolition project—but it marks one very large step for McCormick: He’s using actors. And as he prepared to cast his feature, McCormick realized that “I should start making shorts and…putting people in them.”

Yet the important thing about McCormick’s “first foray into the narrative sort of stuff”—a 13-minute short called The Problem With Machines That Communicate—is how depopulated it is. Three characters roam through cavernous kitchens and cramped studios—all awash in a primary palette of garish red, blue and yellow—where they interact solely with machinery: technology designed to help them play well with others, but which only serves to isolate them more completely. By the time the film reaches its end, an act of antisocial harassment feels like a human-contact high. When The Problem is packaged alongside an 11-minute segment of Future So Bright—with its empty mountain-lion pens moldering in the Arizona sun—and the giddy monkeyshines in the music videos McCormick helmed last year for the Shins and YACHT, the result is a collection of images that each address what it’s like to be lonesome.

“I think that’s ultimately why I became a filmmaker,” McCormick says, “because there’s so much range in the craft. As a young person, I was having a hard time deciding what to do with my life.” An Evening with Matt McCormick is evidence that he has found his calling, and deserves recognition. A director with this capacity for insight should not be left alone. The man who notices should be noticed.