Roger Beebe

A pizza cook who's never left his college town meets the woman of his dreams before finding out there's a huge roadblock to them being together.

Part of Beebe's Films For One To Eight Projectors, an immersive audio/visual experience that Creative Loafing called “both erudite and punk, lo-fi yet high-brow shorts that wrestle with a disfigured, contemporary American landscape.”

"The Strip Mall Trilogy" is a series of three city symphonies that attempt to liberate color, sound, and form from the sprawling consumerist landscape of postmodern America. Part 1, "Green Means Go," presents fragments of color over a musique concrete soundtrack composed of sounds recorded at the strip mall. Part 2, "The Abecedaire," wrestles (and later plays) with alphabetic form extracted and abstracted from the signs of commerce of which they are normally a part. Part 3, "X-formations," tries to argue that there is, in fact, beauty after strip malls. Let's hope so. (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."

"de rerum natura" is a three-part meditation on beauty in the natural world that both embraces and interrogates our knee-jerk response to the glories of nature. The structure of the film stages a conversation between black-and-white 16mm film and iPhone images as ways of representing that beauty. The film concludes with a coda in the form of a half-roll of film shot on my camera by Robert Todd that, in many ways, responds to the hand-wringing in the previous three sections.

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 Originally made for an installation/performance in a planetarium at the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Macon, GA, the film attempts to recapture some of the excitement of the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."

A lazy man's Biblical concordance. A new start for the start. A mechanical rescrambling of a(n all-too) familiar audio text that produces concrete poetry and an ideological unveiling. An experiment in "contracted cinema" or a "zero-projector film."

Part of Beebe's Films For One To Eight Projectors, an immersive audio/visual experience that Creative Loafing called “both erudite and punk, lo-fi yet high-brow shorts that wrestle with a disfigured, contemporary American landscape.”

short film by Roger Beebe

Part of Beebe's Films For One To Eight Projectors, an immersive audio/visual experience that Creative Loafing called “both erudite and punk, lo-fi yet high-brow shorts that wrestle with a disfigured, contemporary American landscape.”

Part of Beebe's Films For One To Eight Projectors, an immersive audio/visual experience that Creative Loafing called “both erudite and punk, lo-fi yet high-brow shorts that wrestle with a disfigured, contemporary American landscape.”

A hand-processed lament for the loss of a 200-year-old sycamore tree, felled to make way for a luxury apartment complex.

Morro Bay, California is a little coastal tourist town known mostly for the Morro Rock, a volcanic plug that sits at the mouth of the Bay. In all the postcards of Morro Bay, the image is framed so that you can't tell that just beyond the edge of the postcard, maybe a few hundred yards from the Rock, is a gargantuan power plant with 3 towering smoke stacks. This film tries to restore the power plant to the frame, so that we can start thinking about what the juxtaposition of these two massive objects might mean.

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.

A diary of a man who can't stop crying like a pussy.

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.

Part of Beebe's Films For One To Eight Projectors, an immersive audio/visual experience that Creative Loafing called “both erudite and punk, lo-fi yet high-brow shorts that wrestle with a disfigured, contemporary American landscape.”

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.

A short live-narrated video essay on the most reviled font on Earth - and what's behind that revulsion.

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.