FILMS for ONE to EIGHT PROJECTORS:
Multi-Projector Experiments
Live Cinema Performance with Roger Beebe
Friday, January 23, 7:00PM
(Members only reception, 6:00PM)
Aurora Members Free, Non-Members $10
After an eight year absence, filmmaker/curator/professor Roger Beebe returns to Aurora Picture Show with a contemporary expanded cinema program titled FILMS for ONE to EIGHT PROJECTORS on Friday, January 23, 7PM (2442 Bartlett Street) that will immerse the audience in imagery and sound. Best known for his live cinema performances, Beebe will host an evening of carefully crafted and meticulously timed multi-projector experiments that pull from his practice of appropriating educational, industrial and mass-cultural imagery. Featuring several of his best-known projector performances, the evening will include work with topics ranging from Las Vegas suicides to phone book politics. Beebe is available for interviews in advance of the event and will also host a Q&A at the screening.
Wyatt Williams of Creative Loafing in Atlanta said of the work: "Beebe's films are both erudite and punk, lo-fi yet high-brow shorts that wrestle with a disfigured, contemporary American landscape." Presented as part of a three-month tour, highlights of the program include the six-projector show-stopping space jam "Last Light of a Dying Star" as well as the premiere of his latest multi-projector mayhem, "SOUND FILM." The program also includes his most recent video, "Historia Calamitatum (The Story of My Misfortunes), Part II: The Crying Game," (award winner at a number of festivals including Chicago Underground, IC Docs, and Milwaukee Underground), which explores the forbidden pleasures of male tears.
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 Beebe says, "they can only be screened with [the filmmaker] actually running the projectors- and running from projector to projector."
For more information on Beebe, visit his website http://rogerbeebe.com/. A sample of a past screening at Austin Film Society is available HERE.
The following works will be featured in this program:
Congratulations (One Step at a Time)
Notes on gender in the 21st Century. A sad sequel to "You've Come a Long Way, Baby."
TB TX DANCE
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." TB TX DANCE, also known as "32.37" (the price of that meal), is the resulting film. 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.
Money Changes Everything
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
[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
SOUND FILM explores the history and technologies of sound reproduction and the way we "picture" sound as image.
Historia Calamitatum
It's all right to cry. Sometimes it's better than all right.
AAAAA Motion Picture
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.
Last Light of a Dying Star
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."
ABOUT ROGER BEEBE
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.