RECYCLED CINEMA // A program of work by Roger Beebe
(USA, super8, 16mm, HD Video, 72 minutes + discussion)
Roger Beebe in attendance!
Roger Beebe is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art at the Ohio State University. He has screened his films around the globe at such unlikely venues as the CBS Jumbotron in Times Square and McMurdo Station in Antarctica as well as more likely ones including Sundance and the Museum of Modern Art. Recent solo shows of his work include the Laboratorio Arte Alameda (Mexico City), the Wexner Center for the Arts, and Anthology Film Archives. He has won numerous honors and awards including a 2013 MacDowell Colony residency, a 2009 Visiting Foreign Artists Grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, and a 2006 Individual Artist Grant from the State of Florida. Beebe is also a film programmer: he ran Flicker, a festival of small-gauge film in Chapel Hill, NC, from 1997-2000 and was the founder and Artistic Director of FLEX, the Florida Experimental Film Festival from 2004-2014.
Programmed by Jenny Miller
RECYCLED CINEMA
Strip Mall Trilogy (2001, 9:10, super8mm)
“The Strip Mall Trilogy” is a series of three city symphonies that attempt to liberate color, sound, and form from the sprawling consumerist landscape of postmodern America. Part 1, “Green Means Go,” presents fragments of color over a musique concrete soundtrack composed of sounds recorded at the strip mall. Part 2, “The Abecedaire,” wrestles (and later plays) with alphabetic form extracted and abstracted from the signs of commerce of which they are normally a part. Part 3, “X-formations,” tries to argue that there is, in fact, beauty after strip malls. Let’s hope so. Parts 1 and 3 were edited entirely in camera.
Famous Irish Americans (2003, 8:00, digital video)
Who’s your famous Irish American? Georgia O’Keefe? William McKinley? Sandra Day O’Connor? How about Shaquille O’Neal? This videotape is a secret history of some of our most overlooked Irish-American citizens; a hyperflat exploration of race, America, and the limits of binary thought.
Money Changes Everything (2009-2011, 5:00, 3x16mm)
Three days in Las Vegas, Nevada; three different visions of the discarded past and of the constantly renewed future. A three-part portrait of a town in transformation: a suburban utopia in the desert, a cancerous sprawl of unplanned development, a destination for suicides.
S A V E (2006, 5:15, 16mm)
A disused gas station offers a curious imperative to passersby: “SAVE.” A riddle posed in the form of architecture: what is there to save? One more installment in the history of Americans pointing their cameras at gas stations; an attempt to figure out something about where we’ve been, where we’re headed, and what’s been left behind. The first part of “S A V E” was edited entirely in camera.
AAAAA Motion Picture (2010, 12:00, 3x16mm)
The Manhattan phone book has 14 pages of companies jockeying to be at the start of the alphabetical listings. Capitalism triumphs over linguistic richness yet again. Our challenge: to learn how to write poetry when there’s only one letter left.
Historia Calamitatum (2014, 21:00, HD digital)
It’s all right to cry. Sometimes it’s better than all right.
SOUND FILM (2015, 12:00, 5x16mm)
SOUND FILM explores the history and technologies of sound reproduction and the way we “picture” sound as image.