Roger Beebe

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

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

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."

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.

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.

"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 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.

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 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.”

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.”

"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)

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.

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

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.”

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 trip to Michael's becomes a (very late) Modernist investigation of form. Six-foot loops of clear leader crisscrossed by washi tape produce pulses of sound and image slowly built into a densely layered cacophony. The film defies gravity as the projectors are flipped on their side while operating.