Last Sunday night at the Boathouse Microcinema, Matt McCormick returned to the quirky old former riverfront fire house in Portland where he had worked and exhibited from the 1990s into the 2010s — and to a community he helped establish.

As part of the Boathouse Microcinema’s spring season, its first since before the pandemic (and which continues with three more events in April and May), McCormick, now an associate professor of film at Gonzaga University in Spokane, was on hand to present Matt McCormick Revisits Old Portland, a retrospective of his own award-winning films. The program included his most celebrated work, 2001’s The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal (a hit at the Sundance Festival) and 1999’s The Vyrotonin Decision, a collage of 1970s TV footage that helped establish McCormick’s career.

He also screened several videos made for the Core Sample arts festival in 2004, featuring local artists including David Eckard, Rankin Renwick, Johnne Eschelman, Charm Bracelet, and damali ayo.

“I just had a good time-traveling moment,” McCormick said as the screening concluded.

Like Sunday night’s program, McCormick’s career has always possessed this artist-curator duality. He’s not only a talented maker of experimental shorts, documentaries, narrative features and music videos: In the 1990s he also founded the Peripheral Produce experimental film series, which helped launch the careers of several artists who went on to larger success, including the now internationally-renowned filmmaker and novelist Miranda July. McCormick was arguably the most significant figure in Portland’s burgeoning turn-of-the-21^st-century experimental film community.

The Boathouse Years

The Boathouse Microcinema, where McCormick’s show screened last Sunday, was actually his home beginning in 1999. Located on the Willamette Riverfront near the east end of the Fremont Bridge, it was built in 1923 to house the Portland Fire Bureau’s firefighting boat, the David Campbell.

Abandoned by the bureau in 1960, the Boathouse  became home to McCormick and other roommates, including fellow Peripheral Produce alums Owen and Tyler. There was also enough space for a small video-production facility. From the Boathouse, McCormick went on to make nearly all of his films and videos.

McCormick’s own first film, 1999’s The Vyrotonin Decision, which screened Sunday night in a new high-definition transfer, was made possible by his curation.

In 1997, after The Oregonian published a story featuring McCormick, July and other members of the local experimental film scene, he received a phone call from someone at KATU, explaining that the TV station was about to throw away hundreds of old 16-millimeter films reels, containing commercials, promos, and discontinued shows. If McCormick could be there the following Sunday morning, the man told him, the whole collection was available.

The film trove was so large that McCormick took two trips filling his Honda Civic hatchback, but he used the reels to create The Vyrotonin Decision. Using scissors, tape and even a hole-puncher, he spent hundreds of hours combining the 16mm reels into a surreal, hilarious cinematic collage. Exercise guru Jack LaLanne gave way to a suicide-counseling documentary, then ads for grocery-store beef sales and 8-track tape players.

Included in Sunday’s retrospective was perhaps the most acclaimed work of his career, 2001’s The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal. Narrated by Miranda July and screened at the Sundance Film Festival, it’s a kind of tongue-in-cheek documentary, which views civic efforts to eradicate tagging and graffiti as, like the title indicates, an unintentional artform of its own, drawing comparisons to legendary modernist and minimalist art by Mark Rothko and Russian constructivism.

Like nearly all of McCormick’s films, it has great visual lyricism, becoming a love letter to industrial Portland, including several shots from outside the Boathouse. McCormick’s film garnered copious praise from major art critics upon its release, including Roberta Smith in The New York Times and Matthew Higgs in Artforum. In 2022, for Sundance’s 40^th anniversary, The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal was chosen for a special showcase of 40 films originally appearing at the fest from 1985 through 2001.

In the 2000s, McCormick directed several music videos, for bands including Sleater-Kinney and The Shins. The lead singers of those two bands, Carrie Brownstein (later of Portlandia TV show fame) and James Mercer, also starred in McCormick’s lone narrative feature, 2010’s Some Days Are Better Than Others. After the film’s mixed critical response he returned to more personal nonfiction fare, including 2012’s The Great Northwest, chronicling a road trip based on a scrapbook he found in a thrift store, commemorating four women’s journey around the region.

2017’s Buzz One Four documented the ill-fated flight of a Cold War B-52 bomber loaded with two thermonuclear bombs — and piloted by McCormick’s grandfather — that crashed 90 miles from Washington, D.C., nearly causing a horrific disaster. That same year, NcCormick founded the Boathouse Microcinema, showing films just as he’d done at other venues with Peripheral Produce.

In 2018, McCormick’s years of living at the Boathouse came to end when he was hired at Gonzaga University as an assistant professor, after lecturing for six years at Portland State University. He’s completed one film since then, 2020’s The Deepest Hole, which screened Sunday night. With a similar blend of straightforward nonfiction storytelling and dry bemusement, it documents a Cold War race between the U.S. and USSR to drill deep enough to go beyond the earth’s crust into its magma. The Soviets, who dug much deeper, also unwittingly prompted a fabricated story that made the rounds of American televangelists: that diggers were surprised to hear audible moaning, presumed to be from condemned souls in hell.

Discovering and Cultivating a Scene

In a post-screening interview Sunday night, Boathouse Microcinema’s Bryan Boyce (who revived the McCormick-founded screening series with Chris Freeman this year, and whose past films were exhibited at Peripheral Produce) used a term coined by musician and producer Brian Eno: “scenius,” a play on the word “genius” but applying to an entire scene or community of artists: a collective intelligence. “Your work exists within your community, and that forms you,” Boyce told McCormick, as lead-in to a question about “Portland as a creative scene that helped nurture you.”

McCormick answered by going back to his beginnings. After earning a film degree at the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico in 1995 under the tutelage of pioneering experimental-film historian Gene Youngblood, he’d packed his car and driven to the West Coast, not knowing where he would settle. While visiting Portland, McCormick happened upon a screening of short films during the Northwest Film & Video Festival, at the Portland Art Museum’s Berg Swan Auditorium.

Already knowing that celebrated indie-film director Gus Van Sant lived here, as did some of his favorite indie-rock musicians, when McCormick saw the packed film-festival audience, “that was a huge part of my decision: that the road trip would be ending here,” he said. “I was just so excited. I had all these ideas of things I wanted to do, and this was fertile soil for those things to happen.”

The Peripheral Produce series debuted in 1996 at celebrated rock club X-Ray Café, which was appropriate because the ’90s indie and punk rock scene, with its accessible do-it-yourself ethos, had inspired McCormick as much as the classic avant garde films of Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage that he’d studied in college. Within a year, Peripheral Produce was gaining attention. Eventually it moved to the Hollywood Theatre, surprising McCormick with sold-out audiences.

“It was just this communal energy,” he recalled. “Every one of those Peripheral Produce shows, leading up to it, we’d be at the Hollywood setting up and I’d be exhausted, thinking, ‘I haven’t slept in days. This is gonna be the last one.’ Then it would sell out, with a line of people winding behind the theater waiting to get in. And it’d be like, ‘Of course we’re gonna do this again.’ By the end of the night, I’m already booking the next show.”

McCormick’s Peripheral Produce shows were popular because, like his own films, they fused esoteric non-narrative storytelling with humor. “You usually don’t say avant-garde and fun in the same sentence,” he later told me for a 2004 Independent Film & Video Monthly article. “But that’s what I want Peripheral Produce to be.” Though these filmmakers were talented, the collective do-it-yourself attitude, borrowed from punk and indie rock, also created a culture of accessibility. By the mid-2000s, I had begun making films, too.

Peripheral Produce wasn’t the only game in town. The Northwest Film Center (now PAM CUT), through its Northwest Film & Video Festival each fall (later renamed the Northwest Filmmakers Festival) as well as its Northwest Tracking series throughout the year and a local shorts program during the Portland International Film Festival each winter, also did much to spotlight local filmmakers. Together, the Film Center and Peripheral Produce created a kind of yin and yang of grassroots and institutional opportunities for one’s films to be seen.

At the time, I was a young Willamette Week film critic, wowed by this emerging community. I’d always been secondary to the paper’s veteran critics, who would review the most highly-anticipated art house features and Hollywood blockbusters. But I found a niche covering this burgeoning local film scene. My colleagues could have Titanic and Men In Black. I had a front-row seat to something more authentic, inspiring and homegrown.

Launching Careers

Peripheral Produce helped many filmmakers get their start, including Miranda July, who went on to worldwide renown for directing acclaimed movies such as 2005’s Me and You and Everyone We Know (which won the Caméra d’Or for best debut at that year’s Cannes Film Festival), as well as for writing novels including 2024’s All Fours (which was shortlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction).

After moving to Portland in 1995, July got her start in film, creating an alternative distribution system for herself and other women filmmakers. Described as a “chainletter tape,” it initially was called Big Miss Moviola and later renamed Joanie 4 Jackie.

At the same time, her own shorts, drawing from performance art, began gaining notice through Peripheral Produce shows and compilation videos, including 1999’s Nest of Tens and 2001’s Getting Stronger Every Day.

Also a participant in the early Peripheral Produce shows was Jon Raymond, who has since built a successful screenwriting career, including several collaborations with director Kelly Reichardt such as 2008’s Wendy and Lucy, 2010’s Meek’s Cutoff, 2019’s First Cow, and 2022’s Showing Up. Raymond, still Portland-based, was also Emmy-nominated for his work with director Todd Haynes on a Mildred Pierce remake for HBO, and is an Oregon Book Award-winning writer of fiction books, most recently the 2022 novel Denial.

By 2001, Peripheral Produce was successful enough that it transitioned into an annual festival, the PDX Film Fest, attracting filmmakers from around the world. Running through 2009, its highlight was always the Peripheral Produce Invitational, an invited competition where an audience vote determined the winner.

At one Invitational, for example, I remember a brilliant montage by filmmaker Melody Owen called Waiting With Guns, a montage of one familiar moment from many different Hollywood westerns, just before a gunfight when cowboys would crouch with their rifles. Owen is now an exhibiting artist and archivist with Elizabeth Leach Gallery.

There was also Andy Blubaugh, who made captivating film diaries, be it of his search for love or of being violently attacked. Portland filmmaker Rob Tyler was also an Invitationals fixture, his “Novice Robots” shorts paying hilarious homage to everyday objects such as popcorn poppers and electric can openers. Tyler and Blubaugh have gone on to successful commercial-video careers, as has Portland filmmaker Trevor Fife, whose film Meridian Days won the 2002 Invitational before being selected for Sundance.

Rankin Renwick, who won the first Peripheral Produce Invitational in 2001, was involved in Peripheral Produce screenings as early as 1997. In those days known as Vanessa Renwick, they have gone on to an award-winning career exhibiting at PDX Contemporary Art locally, but continue to show films around the country and beyond.

Core Sample as Time Capsule

Sunday Night’s program at the Boathouse Microcinema also included several videos McCormick made chronicling Core Sample, a 2004 citywide visual art survey, as part of a DVD accompanying the printed catalog.

Previewing the footage, which he hadn’t seen in more than 20 years, McCormick was so charmed that, as he explained to the Boathouse audience, he considered 2004 to have been perhaps “peak Portland.” None of the works were traditional offerings to be hung on the wall. Instead, they were interactive installations and conversation pieces that engaged and involved their audiences, usually on very limited budgets.

One of the artists whose work was featured, David Eckard, died just a few days before Sunday’s screening, and McCormick, unaware, had even emailed Eckard an invitation to the screening. Eckard’s Core Sample contribution, Scribe, showed him wheeling from his studio a portable rotating-metal platform that enabled him to mark simple circles, which he then made all over the city. Another video chronicled a project called Elephant, by the artist duo known as Charm Bracelet: Brad Adkins and Christopher Buckingham. They spent nine days acquiring local art-exhibition brochures from every local gallery and display space, more than 170 in all; the printed materials were then shredded and used to fill a transparent vinyl elephant.

Renwick’s installation, Hunting Requires Optimism, featured a line of old refrigerators, each with a small TV inside displaying footage of elk and deer being hunted. Johnne Eschelman’s installation, Traveling Cinema, found the artist erecting a temporary indoor room, from which he improvised guitar music while a projector looped old film reels. And damali ayo’s work was performed (if that’s the right word) on the street. Panhandling for Reparations was just that, with ayo spending days sitting on sidewalks with a cardboard sign, soliciting donations for slavery reparations. Three years later, the artist staged a larger version in multiple cities with numerous participants.

The inclusion of these video-based artist profiles marked even starker than McCormick’s own films the passage of time. Besides Eckard’s passing, three of the other artists have relocated to other cities: Adkins to Belleville, Illinois (a St. Louis suburb), ayo to Chicago, and Eschelman to Brooklyn. Beyond the Core Sample artists portrayed Sunday, many of the best Peripheral Produce and PDX Film Fest participating artists have all but disappeared from the local film and visual art communities. Only Renwick remains a working artist in Portland. But that’s all the more reason that these videos screened Sunday, and McCormick’s return, illuminated what was a different and magical time, when cultivating community meant coming together in person.

“The Internet was just kind of starting to happen, but there wasn’t that much going on, like you’d find some websites but there was no social media yet,” McCormick said in the after-screening Q&A on Sunday night. “So we really still didn’t talk to each other online that much. We’d come together and work in spaces together. There was just a truly magical thing that was going on here, that so many people were contributing to. Not only were we benefiting from that collaboration, but also refueling ourselves from it, and I think that was the important part.”

Telling (and re-telling) the Story

Over the next month the Boathouse Microcinema’s spring season continues. Monday, April 28, brings a retrospective of two more veteran filmmakers who emerged within this scene, Rose Bond and Zak Margolis, and on May 12 is Lost Landscapes of Portland, co-presented with Stephen Slappe and Dead Media Hour, followed by three more shows in May.

While last Sunday night’s show was called Matt McCormick Revisits Old Portland, he is not the sort who rails in a cloud of nostalgia against what the city has become, nor was his departure for Spokane six years ago a rejection. Rather, there has always been an elegiac poetry to McCormick’s filmography: a reverence for obsolete buildings and places as well as cultural ephemera, leavened with humor, melancholy and irony.

Having now spent six years at Gonzaga University, McCormick told Sunday’s Boathouse Microcinema audience, “I will still keep making films. But I love being a professor. I love teaching. That has kind of become the new art practice, I’m starting to realize.”

McCormick’s alma mater, the College of Santa Fe, ceased to exist in 2009, but given how professor Gene Youngblood opened this 19-year-old’s eyes to experimental film in the mid-’90s, why not pass on those lessons to a new generation? After all, telling the story of our cultural history with a personal twist is perhaps not that different from repackaging otherwise-discarded old film reels into a captivating new cinematic collage, as McCormick did with his first film a quarter-century ago.