Guild Theater
829 SW 9th Ave., 221-1156
9:15 pm Friday, Aug. 4
$5
For more information
on Peripheral Produce, visit its website at www.jps.net/perph.
Peripheral Produce
alum Miranda July was recently featured in The New York
Times
and Film Comment after a successful screening at
New York's Lincoln Center.
McCormick has
worked as a technician on a variety of locally filmed Hollywood
productions, including the upcoming Navy Diver starring
Cuba Gooding Jr. and Robert De Niro
Matt McCormick is on a roll. Two months ago the local experimental
filmmaker made his first-ever trip to the New York Underground
Film Festival. Competing against some of the best gonzo
filmmakers in the world, McCormick walked away with the
Best Experimental Film award for The Virotonin Decision,
a hilarious and surreal collage of discarded 1970s TV footage.
Meanwhile, McCormick continues as curator of Peripheral
Produce, a Portland-based collective that promotes, screens
and distributes top local and national experimental film.
Although Peripheral Produce began in warehouses, clubs and
living rooms scattered across the city, a recently forged
partnership with the Northwest Film Center has given McCormick's
collective a chance to emerge from its underground roots
and reach wider audiences thirsting for alternatives to
Hollywood. On the heels of this spring's showcase of Texas
filmmaker Bill Brown, Peripheral Produce is back with a
collection of works by some of McCormick's colleagues on
the film-festival circuit.
"Most of the stuff in this show is made by people I met
going to festivals with my own films," says McCormick, who
in addition to NYUFF has traveled to the Ann Arbor, Taos
and South by Southwest film festivals. "It's a great scene.
People meet and get inspired by each other's work. That's
what made me want to do this show."
The highlight of Friday's Peripheral Produce exhibition
is HKG, Danish filmmaker Gerard Holthius' stunning
11-minute chronicle of the now-closed Hong Kong airport,
which was so close to the edge of the city that planes seemed
destined to clip TV antennas and weather vanes on every
takeoff and landing. Shot in high-contrast black-and-white
and virtually silent except for David Byrne's minimalist
soundtrack, HKG is part travelogue, part kaleidoscope--and
wholly masterful. "When I saw it I got almost mad," says
McCormick. "I wished that I could be the one to make it."
The evening also includes work from a variety of other
filmmakers whose work showed with McCormick's around the
country. Emily Hubley's Pigeon Within combines hand-drawn
animation and Xerox photos for a poignant rendering of late-night
New York City after the parties end, set to the music of
Yo La Tengo (Hubley's sister Georgia plays drums in the
band). Jim Trainor's award-winning The Bats and his
newest effort, The Moschops, are silly, morbid, primitively
animated takeoffs on National Geographic-style documentaries,
offering bizarre first-person observations such as, "I love
to defecate and comb myself and drink water." Other films
include Baltimore filmmaker Martha Colurn's Spiders in
Love and the latest video from Negativland, the brave
and brilliant multimedia sampling artists who have vexed
everyone from Casey Kasem to U2.
"In the grand scheme of things, this is the bottom," McCormick
says of his filmmaking brethren. "For the people making
this stuff, there's no money and no commercial motivation.
So it just comes down to the joy of doing it. People like
me have a kind of allergic reaction to mass media. To create
our own little world and react to what we're seeing every
day is both rewarding and lots of fun."
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