Matt McCormick’s film The Great Northwest is an affectionate record of a bygone America. By Edward Lawrenson
The inspiration behind
The Great Northwest occurred when director Matt McCormick was spending some time browsing in a junk shop. Among the shop’s various bits of merchandise was the scrap book of a road trip through the North West of America made by four women friends in the late 1950s. Full of postcards, photos, menus, even a napkin alongside the multi-state itinerary of the “ladies” – as McCormick affectionately calls them – the scrapbook was a collection of faded relics of the trip. Armed with the book and his camera, McCormick got in his car and retraced their journey.
The result is a beguiling mix of travelogue, road movie and documentary. Combing the material he shot during his own trip with the souvenirs the ladies collected more than 50 years ago, the movie is in part a gently melancholic portrait of a culture that has long disappeared. “It is easy to find a sense of nostalgia in these images,” he says of the ephemera that the ladies collected for their scrapbook, “but they do represent a time that seems to be quickly fading.” As he makes his journey, McCormick realises that some of the local attractions the ladies visited have long since gone: “The unique, individual road-side Americana of the 1950s is being replaced with corporate mass-production at an alarming rate.”
There is a certain poignancy, too, in the scrapbook itself, a lovingly crafted, handmade artefact quite unlike the instant digital photos that now tend to record our holidays. “Everything is so disposable these days,” says McCormick. “The photos we take don’t even get printed out and only exist digitally on computer screens. Half of them are probably deleted before the vacation is even over.”
The sheer ubiquity and ease of digital photography also means, says McCormick, that “many tourists spend more time looking at the digital display of their cameras than they spend looking at the actual subject they are photographing.” The point is made with wit during his film when McCormick trains his camera on a line of tourists expectantly waiting for the eruption of the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone Park. When it finally happens, most of the audience experience this impressive natural phenomenon through the tiny screen of their compact cameras or phones.
Taking over a year to edit the film – “the first several months were dedicated to simply figuring out the structure, while the second half was spent fine-tuning the edit, mixing the sound, and adjusting the colour” – McCormick says that the IFFR premiere of his film was “absolutely fantastic”. And did he ever find out anything more about the “ladies” than the artful scraps they left behind? “No, but I maintain hope that someday someone might see the film and have some information about them.”
More about The Great Northwest here.