Rodeo Films

Matt McCormicks Filme wurden an Filmfestivals, in Kunstmuseen und Kinos rund um die Welt gezeigt. Sie wurden auf MTV und dem Sundance Channel ausgestrahlt und bekamen positive Kritiken von The New York Times und dem Film Comment Magazine. McCormick hat mit unterschiedlichen Künstlern wie The Shins, Miranda July, Sleater Kinnex, The Postal Service und Calvin Johnson zusammen gearbeitet. Seine Filme wurden vom San Francisco International Film Fest zum Best Short Film ausgezeichnet, vom New York Underground Film Fest zum Best Experimental Film erkürt und vom Media City Film Fest erhielt er den Grand Prize.
1996 gründetet McCormick Peripheral Produce, ein Videolabel, welches Videocompilations und DVDs mit Experimentalfilmen produziert und vertreibt. Das Portland Documentary und eXperimental Film Festival begann 2001 und war ebenso als Plattform für die Peripheral Produce Künstler gedacht wie auch dafür, neue und innovative Werke nach Portland zu bringen.

Die präsentierten Filme:

Going to the Ocean
A textured mood swing and a trip to the beach. An examination of seaworthy vessels? Answers questioned in a slow-motion memory lapse. Night-vision video (transferred to film) and found Kodachrome with an improvised noise soundtrack: trains/static/melodeon. Going to the Ocean made its world premiere at the 2001 New York Film Festival's "Views from Avante Garde" program.
16mm - 8 minutes - 2001

Sincerely, Joe P. Bear
Polar bears, ice queens, lost love… appropriated news clips from the 1960's combine with hand-painted film to tackle the momentous issue of how polar bears cope with heartbreak and rejection. Joe P. Bear has screened at a bunch of festivals including the 2000 Rotterdam International Film Festival and won the "Best Experimental Film" award at the 2000 Microcine Fest in Baltimore.
16mm - 4 minutes 30 seconds - 1999

The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal
Emerging from the human psyche and showing characteristics of abstract expressionism, minimalism and Russian constructivism, graffiti removal has secured its place in the history of modern art while being created by artists who are unconscious of their artistic achievements.
16mm/Digital video - 16 minutes - 2001

The Past and Pending
In this music video for The Shins, a young man and a grand-fatherly figure drive through the country side taking snap-shots of the passing landscapes.
5 minutes 30 seconds - co-directed with Greg Brown - 2003

American Nutria
Nutria are a large, odd looking rodent from Argentina that were imported to the United States by the fur industry in the 1930's and 40's. Now, 60+ years after their introduction to North America, they appear to be on track to eating the entire continent. Nobody really knows how to get rid of them, but there have been some pretty interesting attempts...
Digital video - 11 minutes - 2003

Grounded
An examination of size and weight through the culmination of heavy industry, urban wildlife, a Bolex and a Casio SK1.
16mm on digital video - 4 minutes 30 seconds - 2004

Jumpers
This music video for Sleater Kinney follows a female character as she plows through her mundane life while secretly using office supplies to build her escape pod.
4 minutes 30 seconds - 2005

Towlines
Towlines is an experimental documentary that explores the visual characteristics of the maritime industry and pays homage to these great workhorses.
16mm on video - 22 minutes - 2004

Chicago Reader, März 2002:

"In the last few years, 29 year old Matt McCormick of Portland Oregon has emerged as one of our strongest independent filmmakers, doing work that's both ingenuous and humorously absurd. His latest, Going to the Ocean (2001) is as simple as a haiku: it begins with a long take of ships gliding through an urban waterway at night while superimposed highway lights sail by, creating a strangely menacing mood; then it cuts to old home-movie footage of adults playing in the surf. Both elements literalize the title, though one deals with industry and the other with nature, contrasted in a way that transcends irony. The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal (2001), another of his films, is at once a delightful parody of overheated art-history hermeneutics and an authentic plea for the appreciation of disregarded urban patterns. A dead-serious voice-over praises the rectangular and other patterns left by city employees who remove graffiti as an "unconscious and collaborative" art. Patterns on walls, train cars, and shipping containers are compared to paintings by Rothko and Malevich and cataloged as "symmetrical," "radical," and "ghosting," in style. In Sincerely, Joe P. Bear (1999) McCormick uses hilarious old found footage of someone in a polar bear suit cavorting with a pretty female model who's seated on a block of ice. In a distorted voice over, the bear expresses his love for the model in sentiments both ridiculous and achingly believable."
Fred Camper

www.rodeofilmco.com