Film Love presents ROGER BEEBE IN PERSON
Films for One to Eight Projectors Saturday, September 5, 2009
at Eyedrum
8:00 PM
Multiple images from Roger Beebe's Last
Light of a Dying Star
Florida filmmaker Roger Beebe has shown work
in such unlikely venues as McMurdo Station in Antarctica and the CBS Jumbotron
in Times Square - as well as the Museum of Modern Art, Sundance Film Festival,
and many other traditional spaces. Returning to Eyedrum after an acclaimed 2005
appearance, Beebe presents an evening of short films which use multiple
simultaneously running projectors to immerse the audience in imagery. These
works draw on the long tradition of multi-screen cinema, from Abel Gance's
Napoleon to the "expanded cinema" of Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic
Inevitable.
Among other films, Beebe will present a retooled two-projector version of his
well-known Strip Mall Trilogy; Money Changes Everything, an
elaborate three-projector meditation on Las Vegas; and the eight-projector
magnum opus Last Light of a Dying Star. Made and projected in a variety
of formats (video, 16mm, and super-8mm), the films combine found footage and
Beebe's own striking imagery of American landscapes, seen through the prism of
technological change. But they also exist as "performance films" - since as Mr.
Beebe says, "they can only be screened with [the filmmaker] actually running the
projectors - and running from projector to projector."
As part of its ongoing series of visiting artists, Film Love is proud to host
Roger Beebe, whose engaging in-person appearances often result in lively
post-screening discussions.
ROGER BEEBE is a professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of
Florida. He has screened in many venues around the United States, winning
numerous awards and grants, including Best Experimental Film at the 2006 Chicago
Underground Film Festival. In addition to his work as a filmmaker, he ran
Flicker, a festival of small gauge film in Chapel Hill, NC, from 1997-2000 and
is currently artistic director of FLEX, the Florida Experimental Film Festival.
He owns Video Rodeo, an independent video store in Gainesville, FL.
PROGRAM The program will include the following works,
plus selections to be chosen. Notes on the films below were written by Roger
Beebe.
Last Light of a Dying Star (2008, 4 X
16mm, 3 X video, 1 X super-8mm, 30 minutes)
Originally made for an installation/performance in a planetarium at the Museum
of Arts and Sciences in Macon, GA, the film attempts to recapture some of the
excitement of the early days of space exploration and the utopian aspirations of
expanded cinema. Made as an orchestration of a number of different elements,
made and found: handmade cameraless film loops by Beebe and Jodie Mack; striking
sequences of digital stills by Cassandra C. Jones; 16mm educational films about
eclipses, asteroids, comets, and meteorites; and a super-8 print of an East
German animated film.
Money Changes Everything (2009, 3 X 16mm,
5 minutes)
Three days in Las Vegas, Nevada, and three different versions of the discarded
past and 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.
TB TX Dance (2006, 2 X 16mm, 3 minutes)
A cameraless film made on a black & white laser printer with an optical
soundtrack made of dots of varying sizes provides the backdrop for revisiting
Toni Basil's appearance in Bruce Conner's 1966 film Breakaway.
Commissioned as part of Mike Plante's Lunchfilm series, where filmmakers are
asked to make films for less than the price of the lunch they've just been
treated to. (This film's budget was $32.37 worth of pulled pork sandwiches and
peach cobbler.)
The Strip Mall Trilogy (2001, 1 X
super-8mm, 1 X video, 9 minutes)
A look straight into the heart of the most postmodern of architectural forms,
the strip mall, shot in a mile-long parking lot that could be Anywhere, USA.
Eyedrum
290 Martin Luther King
Jr Dr Suite 8, Atlanta, GA, 30312
404.522.0655 www.eyedrum.org
