The Film Study Center at Harvard University, Balagan Films, and the AgX Film Collective are pleased to welcome Ohio-based filmmaker Roger Beebe for an evening of new works on 16mm and video, as part of his first East Coast tour in seven years. "Films for One to Eight Projectors" features several premieres of new works alongside some of his best-known projector performances (including the six-projector show-stopping “Last Light of a Dying Star”), as well as recent award-winning work in single-channel HD video. These works take on a range of strategies from formalist investigations of the materiality of film to essayistic explorations of popular culture and topics ranging 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 the real spaces of the virtual economy (“Amazonia”). For more on Beebe's work, see http://www.rogerbeebe.com/
BIO: Roger Beebe is a filmmaker whose work since 2006 consists primarily of multiple projector performances that explore the world of found images and the "found" landscapes of late capitalism. 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 with solo shows at Anthology Film Archives, The Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico City, and Los Angeles Filmforum among many other venues. 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. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Art at the Ohio State University where he helped to launch the new Moving-Image Production major in Fall 2017.
"Turning film-projection into a performance, Beebe’s medium blurs the line between film and music... With his own two hands, Beebe manipulates dozens of analog artifacts that can’t be fully automated; as a result, there’s a degree of spontaneity and authenticity to every performance that can never be replicated with 100% accuracy." -Andrew Swafford, Arts Knoxville
"[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)