What we need to talk about now is Roger Beebe. Beebe’s Films for One to Eight Projectors is on tour till the end of the month. This is Experimental Film rendered as performance art, a show that demands filmmaker and audience interaction because Beebe has to be there, talking to you as he physically threads and re-threads actual film projectors. It’s also performance in the sense that there is intimate conversation between films, and after the screenings, and at least one very unusual sing-along. Even the physical objects employed carry significant aesthetic import. The projectors are machines salvaged or purchased from the dusty storerooms of libraries and schoolhouses. These institutions across America routinely discard the obsolete films of the mid-century educational species. Of course, they are only obsolete if you don’t recognize them as the treasures they are. Beebe saves precious films, and those lovely contraptions called projectors, from the dumpster’s jaws, and he encourages all of us to visit local schools and libraries and see if they will donate or sell any old 16mm films and projectors. This is such a good idea that I would quit my job if I had one, and just do that for the rest of my life.
Anyway, Roger Beebe is not really a “found footage” artist, he’s a filmmaker. He designs and animates and shoots and edits and exhibits. The difference is that his presence is essential to the experience because he’s playing these projectors like instruments. (Okay, some of his films can be properly experienced on DVD).
He’s also a professor (Ph.D.) at the University of Florida. He writes books about music and pop culture and stuff. But don’t let that fool you. He takes Films for One to Eight Projectors (and all his film work) seriously. He negotiated a one-year unpaid leave of absence from his U of F gig to get these experimental film images to the public. And really, as a film lover, this kind of lo-fi, idiosyncratic, lovingly staged, cinematic experience is priceless. I love it when the public wins, and I think U of F ought to be paying Beebe for the year, IMHO. Roger Beebe has been showing his work at MicroCineFest and Creative Alliance in Baltimore since the late ‘90’s, and a number of local independent/ underground film artists and aficionados turned out for the screening. I attended with Keith Weiner, friend and producer of Rows. Cyclops is such an art funhouse, I started angling with Andy to maybe do a meta-screenwriting event there for storysolver.com. If anyone has an interest in that area, please do send me a smoke signal.
So thank you Andy Rubin of Cyclops and Skizz Cyzyk and MicroCineFest for hosting Films for One to Eight Projectors, and check out more Roger Beebe here.
There’s a lot to talk about, what with Cyclops headed for an exciting physical makeover, Skizz’s epic doc Hit & Stay that chronicles the Catonsville Nine and connects the dots to the here and now, and the reformation of MicroCineFest, but these are matters for future columns.
