Roger Beebe

Strip Mall Trilogy

"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)

Paperback

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

"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.

Last Light of a Dying Star

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 Originally made for an installation/performance in a planetarium at the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Macon, GA, the film attempts to recapture some of the excitement of the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

Home Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry

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.

un arbre

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

Beginnings

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."

Amazonia

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."