The first sign that Peripheral Produce is not like other film festival organizers or DVD production labels -- that it is not, in fact, like much else in the country -- is its location. A squat, pale-blue warehouse perched on the industrial shipyards of Portland, Oregon, the group's headquarters is sandwiched between a grain elevator and a cement elevator. "The cement one explodes every once in a while," says Portland Documentary and eXperimental Film Festival director Gretchen Hogue, "which is bad for the lungs."
It seems to be good for the imagination, though. Peripheral Produce founder Matt McCormick has used the Portland docks as the subject for his short movies -- projects like The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal, a documentary that examines the oddly soothing squares of paint used by city employees to conceal the work of local taggers. If this hardly seems like a likely subject for the cinema, well, that's the idea. For a dozen years, Peripheral Produce (named for its goal of showing and distributing experimental movies as fresh as fruit) has been attracting groundbreaking and just plain eccentric filmmakers to show their works on the banks of the Willamette River. Miranda July got her start here in 1996, billing herself as "The Human Movie!"; last year, the winner of the Peripheral Produce Invitational was 92-year-old George Andrus, who had been working in his home, Hogue says, "really closely photographing the film you get from soap."
McCormick, whose studio is also distinguished by a giant cardboard penny costume he designed for a music video, sees experimental filmmaking as a cutting-edge folk art: "Who needs to worry about Hollywood," he's fond of saying, "when your roommate's making the best movie ever?" So when the next PDX Fest hits Portland on April 30th, it could include a movie made for Fisher-Price View-Masters, or a musical number about gerbils. Promises McCormick: "We bring the party to experimental film!"
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