January 25th, 2015
12:15pm
@ Alamo Drafthouse at the Ritz
320 East 6th Street, Austin, TX 78701 (map)
$8.25 (BUY TICKETS)
Filmmaker/curator/professor Roger Beebe returns to Austin in January 2015 with a touring program of his multiple-projector performances that takes him to three corners of North America with an additional stop off in the Antipodes (Australia/New Zealand). The tour features several of his best-known projector performances (including the six-projector show-stopping space jam Last Light of a Dying Star) alongside recent award-winning work in single-channel HD video as well as the premiere of his latest multi-projector mayhem, SOUND FILM. These works take on a range of topics from the forbidden pleasures of men crying (Historia Calamitatum (The Story of My Misfortunes)) and the secret logic of the book of Genesis (Beginnings) to Las Vegas suicides (Money Changes Everything) and companies jockeying to be at the start of the phone book (AAAAA Motion Picture).
“[Beebe’s films] implicitly and explicitly evoke the work of Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, all photographers of the atomic age whose Western photographs captured the banalities, cruelties and beauties of imperial America.” –David Fellerath, The Independent Weekly
“Beebe’s films are both erudite and punk, lo-fi yet high-brow shorts that wrestle with a disfigured, contemporary American landscape.” –Wyatt Williams, Creative Loafing (Atlanta)
NOTES: On Roger Beebe by J. Ronald Green.
Pre-show
Congratulations (One Step at a Time)
62 min (loop) / HD digital / sound / 2014
Notes on gender in the 21st Century. A sad sequel to “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby.”
Education as factory farming. Congratulations to the cattle.
Installed at the Ann Arbor Film Festival and Disjecta Gallery/EFF Portland. Screened theatrically at the Northwest Film Forum (Seattle) and the Tulsa Overground Film Festival.
Program
TB TX DANCE
2:30 min / 16mm x 2 / sound / 2006
The background of the image is made of patterns of dots directly laser printed on clear leader. That background also doubles as an optical soundtrack with different pitches created by the different density of dots. The dots were inspired by the stockings Toni Basil (“Antonia Christina Basilotta”) wore in Bruce Conner¹s “Breakaway” in 1966, which also serves as the source footage for the dancer in the film. Toni Basil herself is a source of inspiration for all 30-somethings who haven¹t yet made enough of their lives. (She was 39 when “Mickey” was a hit in 1982.)
This film was commissioned at Cinematexas in 2005 over a meal of pulled pork and peach cobbler. This film is also known as “32.37” (the price of that meal).
From the Lunchfilm series: curator Mike Plante has lunch with a filmmaker and then gets a film for the cost of the lunch in trade. Some rules are written on a napkin. Here are the rules for this commission: Reference dance. Reference Texas. Have an autograph in it. Mention Toni Basil.
Money Changes Everything
5 min / 16mm x 3 / sound / 2011
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.
[sic] series
5 min / 16mm / sound / 2014
[sic] series is a collection of three found fragments, presented exactly as found. Three cryptic messages transmitted in their odd perfection. Three time capsules, the only traces of a world now gone forever.
SOUND FILM
12 min / 16mm x 5 / sound / 2015
SOUND FILM explores the history and technologies of sound reproduction and the way we “picture” sound as image.
Historia Calamitatum
21 min / HD digital / sound / 2014
It’s all right to cry. Sometimes it’s better than all right.
Awards:
Jury Citation, Chicago Underground Film Festival
Honorable Mention, IC Docs
Best Personal Documentary, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival
AAAAA Motion Picture
11 min / 16mm x 2 / sound / 2010
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.
Soundtrack (“In A”) by Cody Hennessy with phone calls by Meredith Gill and Roger Beebe and singing by John Orth, Liana Teigen, Natalie Nix, Patrick Fricano, Andrew Alvarez, and Roger Beebe.
Last Light of a Dying Star
26 min / 16mm x 5 / sound / 2008-2011
A multi-projector meditation on the mysteries of space. 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, both original and found: handmade cameraless film loops by Beebe and Jodie Mack; 16mm educational films about eclipses, asteroids, comets, and meteorites; and a super 8 print of the East German animated film “The Drunk Sun.”
Bio
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.