Northwest Film Forum

Filmmaker/curator/professor Roger Beebe visits Seattle with a touring program of his multiple-projector performances. The tour features several of his best-known projector performances (including the six-projector show-stopping space jam “Last Light of a Dying Star”), 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)

"Beebe's work is goofy, startling, and important." —Daniel Kraus, Wilmington Encore

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.

• Don’t miss Roger’s class on camera-less techniques for working on 16mm film, on Sunday!

DISTRESSED FILM WORKSHOP with Roger Beebe
March 29 (Sunday), 11am-2pm
Tuition: $70 ($60 for Members)
Visiting filmmaker!

For those who’ve always wanted to work on film but thought it was too expensive, this class is an introduction to one of the cheapest ways you’ll ever make motion pictures. Learn cameraless techniques for working directly on 16mm film, and make (in class) a series of short 16mm loops using etching, bleaching, direct animation with Sharpies and stamp pads, hole punching, burning and much more. Explore all the things Kodak never wanted you to do to their film, but that you’ve always secretly wanted to (or should have!). 

Register now for the Distressed Film Workshop >

SCREENING PROGRAM

TB TX DANCE 
(2006, 2 X 16MM, 3 min)
“A cameraless film made by running clear leader through the laser printer in my office. Made as a commission by Mike Plante as part of the Lunchfilm series. The rules of the commission:  include Toni Basil, include Texas, include dance, include a signature, must be made for less than $32.37 (the price of the lunch he bought me as the cost of the commission). The dots in the background produce the sound in the film as they run by the exciter lamp.”

[sic] series
(2014, 16mm, 5 min)
[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.

Money Changes Everything
(2009/rev. 2011, 16mm x 3, 5:00)
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.

SOUND FILM
(2015, 16mm x 5, 12:00)
SOUND FILM explores the history and technologies of sound reproduction and the way we “picture” sound as image.

Historia Calamitatum (The Story of My Misfortunes), Part II: The Crying Game  
(2014, digival video, 21 min)
It's all right to cry. Sometimes it's better than all right.

AAAAA Motion Picture 
(2010, 3 X 16MM, 12 min)
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 
(2008, 4 X 16MM, 3 X VIDEO, 1 X SUPER 8MM, 22 min.)
A multi-projector meditation on the passage from film to video, from abstraction to representation, and from the technological wonder of space exploration to the banality of the digital snapshot. 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; 16mm educational films about eclipses, asteroids, comets, and meteorites; and a super 8 print of the East German animated film “The Drunk Sun.”