First Thursday

Roger Beebe: Expanded Cinema

Thursday, January 2, 6 pm

Free

“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

Roger Beebe returns to the road with a program of 16mm multi-projector performances and will make his first stop in Louisville in more than 15 years.

The program features several newer works (Lineage (for Norman McLaren) (2019, 4 x 16mm), de rerum natura (2019, 3 x 16mm + video), Home Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry (2021, 4 x 16mm), alongside some of his best-known projector performances (including the seven-projector show-stopping Last Light of a Dying Star (2008/2011). He will also include a sampling of recent essayistic videos, presented as live-narrated documentaries. These works take on a range of topics from the forbidden pleasures of men crying (Historia Calamitatum [The Story of My Misfortunes]) to the racial politics of font choices (The Comic Sans Video) and the real spaces of the virtual economy (Amazonia).

Roger Beebe is a filmmaker whose work since 2006 consists primarily of multiple-projector performances and essayistic videos 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 the Sundance Film Festival 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 Theatre, Film, and Media Arts at the Ohio State University.