FILM
Interview with Roger Warren Beebe
/ Nancy Keefe Rhodes
12.06.07
When Gainesville’s FLEX Festival opens in late January, founder/artistic director Roger Warren Beebe will welcome experimental film makers from five continents to a Florida college town whose tallest building in 2001 was a pink six-story Holiday Inn.
Beebe, 37, is part of cinema’s mobile, cosmopolitan and highly decentralized experimental wing. That pink hotel––an apt image of how experimental film does not belong to any single city––opens Beebe’s Strip Mall Trilogy (2001), the first of seven shorts on his new DVD, New Maps of the New World. Compiled for his Fall 2007 East Coast Tour, which covered 36 cities in 14 states over eight weeks, New Maps comprises the work Beebe has completed since moving to Gainesville in 2000 from Chapel Hill, where he ran the small-gauge film festival, Flicker.
Besides Strip Mall Trilogy, New Maps includes A Woman, A Mirror (2001), made with choreographer Sara Smith, which pairs pilot Amelia Earhart with modern dance. Composition in Red and Yellow (2002) sends up commercialized patriotism. Famous Irish Americans (2003) glosses race via unexpected surnames. (rock/hard place) (2005) considers tourist images. S A V E (2006) juxtaposes today’s abandoned gas stations with those Robert Frank captured a half century ago in The Americans. Though Beebe usually shoots on super8, 16 mm and digital video, TB TX Dance (2006) uses laser-printed celluloid.
A film professor at the University of Florida, Beebe has screened these films at dozens of festivals, major museums and film archives, and won some serious prizes. He’s at home discussing the cross-art experiments of Paul Strand’s Manhatta collaborator Charles Sheeler or historical figures like Depression-era itinerant filmmaker H. Lee Waters. But for eight years now, he’s also toured his films, an activity he and many experimental filmmakers increasingly view as integral to their aesthetic and about which he admits an “evangelical” fervor. Populist in venue and approach––Beebe likens them to indie rock tours––these small film tours avoid the gate-keepers of the ever-tightening US film distribution and awards credentialing system.
We first spoke in mid-October, when Beebe stopped in Syracuse for a screening at Spark Art Space. Our conversation continued by telephone when Beebe returned to Gainesville after the tour, which he said was “more successful than I imagined.”
You’ve said you and other experimental filmmakers decided, well, why shouldn’t we do this kind of tour? How did you organize this?
I should give credit to the pioneers. Obviously people have been doing things like this back into the Silent era. There’s a guy in the American South, H. Lee Waters, who used to travel from city to city. He would shoot film of the local people during the day, process and assemble it quickly, and then show it at night. So all the townspeople would come out and pay to see themselves on the silver screen. Vanessa Renwick and Bill Daniel did a massive, like 200-day tour from Portland, Oregon all the way over, down the East Coast and back again. I did my first tour in 1999––just a nine-cities, ten days around the American South. I’ve learned over time what works. I’ve got friends strewn all across the country––teaching, managing clubs, involved with art spaces. So that’s where I start.
Beebe, 37, is part of cinema’s mobile, cosmopolitan and highly decentralized experimental wing. That pink hotel––an apt image of how experimental film does not belong to any single city––opens Beebe’s Strip Mall Trilogy (2001), the first of seven shorts on his new DVD, New Maps of the New World. Compiled for his Fall 2007 East Coast Tour, which covered 36 cities in 14 states over eight weeks, New Maps comprises the work Beebe has completed since moving to Gainesville in 2000 from Chapel Hill, where he ran the small-gauge film festival, Flicker.
Besides Strip Mall Trilogy, New Maps includes A Woman, A Mirror (2001), made with choreographer Sara Smith, which pairs pilot Amelia Earhart with modern dance. Composition in Red and Yellow (2002) sends up commercialized patriotism. Famous Irish Americans (2003) glosses race via unexpected surnames. (rock/hard place) (2005) considers tourist images. S A V E (2006) juxtaposes today’s abandoned gas stations with those Robert Frank captured a half century ago in The Americans. Though Beebe usually shoots on super8, 16 mm and digital video, TB TX Dance (2006) uses laser-printed celluloid.
A film professor at the University of Florida, Beebe has screened these films at dozens of festivals, major museums and film archives, and won some serious prizes. He’s at home discussing the cross-art experiments of Paul Strand’s Manhatta collaborator Charles Sheeler or historical figures like Depression-era itinerant filmmaker H. Lee Waters. But for eight years now, he’s also toured his films, an activity he and many experimental filmmakers increasingly view as integral to their aesthetic and about which he admits an “evangelical” fervor. Populist in venue and approach––Beebe likens them to indie rock tours––these small film tours avoid the gate-keepers of the ever-tightening US film distribution and awards credentialing system.
We first spoke in mid-October, when Beebe stopped in Syracuse for a screening at Spark Art Space. Our conversation continued by telephone when Beebe returned to Gainesville after the tour, which he said was “more successful than I imagined.”
You’ve said you and other experimental filmmakers decided, well, why shouldn’t we do this kind of tour? How did you organize this?
I should give credit to the pioneers. Obviously people have been doing things like this back into the Silent era. There’s a guy in the American South, H. Lee Waters, who used to travel from city to city. He would shoot film of the local people during the day, process and assemble it quickly, and then show it at night. So all the townspeople would come out and pay to see themselves on the silver screen. Vanessa Renwick and Bill Daniel did a massive, like 200-day tour from Portland, Oregon all the way over, down the East Coast and back again. I did my first tour in 1999––just a nine-cities, ten days around the American South. I’ve learned over time what works. I’ve got friends strewn all across the country––teaching, managing clubs, involved with art spaces. So that’s where I start.