Roger Beebe
2021Last Light of a Dying Star
Roger Beebe
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 Originally made for an installation/performance in a planetarium at the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Macon, GA, the film attempts to recapture some of the excitement of the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."
Last Light of a Dying Star
[sic] series
Roger Beebe
3 found fragments, perfect as found. Fragment 1 appears to be reversal camera original and was found in the bottom of a trim bin of uncertain provenance at the University of Florida sometime in the mid-2000s. Fragment 2, discovered as the sole content of a 1200' can labeled "What is a Cop?" is a Levi's commercial distressed only by the forces of nature (bacteria? mold and mildew?). Fragment 3 is one of a series of vignettes from "Assertive Training for Women, Part 2," purchased from the College of San Scholastica in Duluth, MN for the princely sum of $1.
[sic] series
![[sic] series](https://api.mamonto.com/media/cache/w210_hA/movies/8266/3956/fc05d03c90d1_6663df68e9360.jpg)
Money Changes Everything
Roger Beebe
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.
Money Changes Everything
Lineage (for Norman McLaren)
Roger Beebe
Lineage is a loop-based “orchestral” film performance for four 16mm projectors. Using as a point of departure Norman McLaren’s abstract animations in Lines Horizontal as well as reworked footage from two documentary portraits of McLaren in his prime and in his later life, the film explores how abstract marks made in a variety of ways—laser printing and etching, contact printing and hand-processing—result in strange and surprising sounds.
Lineage (for Norman McLaren)
Amazonia
Roger Beebe
Amazonia is a live-narrated essayistic meditation on one of the key sites where the virtual world of e-commerce becomes physical: the Amazon.com fulfillment centers where the millions of items available for purchase with the click of a mouse await our orders. The film visits the four cities - New Castle, Delaware; Fernley, Nevada; Coffeyville, Kansas; and Campbellsville, Kentucky - where Amazon's four original fulfillment centers were located to meditate on the impacts of our online purchases on the people and places "at the other end of the internet."
Amazonia
SOUNDFILM
Roger Beebe
A six-projector 16mm film performance, exploring the history of sound recording and the ways in which sound is represented as image. Composed primarily of fragments of 16mm educational films stretching from the 1940s through the 1980s,SOUNDFILM creates a complex visual and sonic space in which these fragments, starting with a compendium of elementary sound primers, coalesce around various key moments and strategies: representations of the vibrations of air particles, anatomical animations of the middle and inner ear, noise and hearing protection, and the technologies for representing sound (optical tracks, oscilloscopes, etc.). Simultaneously, however, the film explores and plays with a certain degree of abstraction that happens in these representations, at times liberating sound and image for their sensual qualities alone. In these sections it also references American minimalist composition with phase shifts and repetitions that recall the work of Steve Reich.
SOUNDFILM
S A V E
Roger Beebe
A disused gas station offers a curious imperative to passersby: "SAVE." A riddle posed in the form of architecture: what is there to save? One more installment in the history of Americans pointing their cameras at gas stations; an attempt to figure out something about where we've been, where we're headed, and what's been left behind.
S A V E
A Metaphor for the End of Just About Everything
Roger Beebe
At one level, this is a document of the final hours of Long's Book Store, a victim to both technological change (as books are ordered online or migrate to digital forms) and the pressures of real estate development (as a public-private partnership devours the blocks directly across from the Ohio State campus, nominally in the interest of establishing a new "Arts Corridor"). But the video is also a more general reflection on mortality and ephemerality, resonating with the billboard image of Félix González-Torre's Untitled (for Parkett), which was also destroyed with the building.
A Metaphor for the End of Just About Everything