Join us for this special outdoor summer event with UnionDocs visiting artists Roger Beebe. At 8pm we will closed doors for a BBQ (meat and veggie options) and drinks. The show will get underway at 9pm.
Over the past decade, with the proliferation of media editing (and appropriating) tools, the entire landscape of for work using found footage has changed; the almost endless string of Bush-era appropriation work that we witnessed everywhere from YouTube to The Daily Show represents nothing less than a total reconfiguration of the media landscape, and artists need to respond to these dramatic changes. Using two videos and a new sound piece as a jumping off point, Beebe will offer his thoughts on and lead a discussion of critical issues around the contemporary practice of found footage videomaking.
“Beebe’s work is goofy, startling, and important.” —Daniel Kraus, Wilmington Encore
Famous Irish Americansby Roger Beebe (2003, 8 minutes, mini-dv)
Who’s your favorite Irish American? Georgia O’Keefe? William McKinley? Sandra Day O’Connor? How about Shaquille O’Neal? This videotape is a secret history of some of our most overlooked Irish-American citizens; a hyperflat exploration of race, America, and the limits of binary thought.
“There just aren’t enough films out there like Roger Beebe’s ‘Famous Irish Americans,’ a graphic lecture insisting that black celebrities with Irish last names really are Irish.” —Kimberly Chun, SF Bay Guardian
Director’s Choice Award, Black Maria Film/Video Festival
One Nation Under Tommy (2004, 15 minutes, mini-dv)
Adapting the children’s game known as “grapevine” or “telephone, this piece is a mutation/deformation/liberation of a cynically patriotic Tommy Hilfiger commercial. The commercial was given to a writer who wrote a script from it that was then given to a filmmaker who made a film of that script which was then passed to another writer who &c. We did that 5 times over two years and One Nation under Tommy is the result.
Conceived, Produced, and Assembled by Roger Beebe
Directed by Josh Gibson, Sallie Patrick, Nayeli Garci-Crespo, Michael Lahey, and Chris Jolly
Written by Gregory S. Moss, Julie Shapiro, Nicole Deane, Kendra Gaeta, Deborah Broderson
BeginningsBy Roger Beebe ***World Premiere Preview***(2010, 5 minutes, digital audio file)
A lazy man’s Biblical concordance. A mechanical rescrambling of an audio text to produce concrete poetry and an ideological unveiling. Restarting from the start. More fun than it sounds.
Roger Beebe is a professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Florida. Beebe has screened his films around the globe at such unlikely venues as McMurdo Station in Antarctica and the CBS Jumbotron in Times Square as well as more traditional venues such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Pacific Film Archive in addition to numerous festivals, among them Sundance, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and New York Underground. He has won dozens of awards including a 2009 Visiting Foreign Artists Grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, a 2006 Individual Artist Grant from the State of Florida, and Best Experimental Film at the 2006 Chicago Underground Film Festival. In addition to his work as a filmmaker, he is also a film programmer: he ran Flicker, a festival of small gauge film in Chapel Hill, NC, from 1997-2000 and is currently Artistic Director of FLEX, the Florida Experimental Film Festival. He also owns Video Rodeo, an independent video store in Gainesville, Florida.
Chris Jolly is a filmmaker/projectionist living in NYC. Perhaps best known for his feature film “Curse of the Seven Jackals” he was also 1/2 of the rap duo “Boom Box 2000”. Additionally, you may have seen his animated short Some Things Ride a Bicycle, which has toured widely with the Bicycle Film Festival. In earlier days he was involved with the Flicker super 8 group.
Gregory Moss is a writer and performer from Newburyport MA. He holds an MFA in Playwriting from Brown University’s Graduate Literary Arts Program. His plays include sixsixsix; Some Obvious Examples of Every Day Life; Billy Witch; House of Gold; and punkplay. His collaborations with filmmaker Roger Warren Beebe have been screened widely at film festivals both in America and abroad. Gregory is the recipient of a 2006-2007 Lucille Lortel Playwriting Fellowship, a 2008 Millay Colony Residency, a 2009 Eugene O’Neill Center National Playwrights Conference residency and a 2010-2011 Jerome Fellowship. His play, punkplay was published in Play A Journal of Plays in December 2009 and was produced in February 2010 at The Steppenwolf Garage in Chicago. A new play, Orange, Hat & Grace, premieres at Soho Rep in September 2010 under the direction of Sarah Benson, and House of Gold will premiere at Woolly Mammoth in November 2010. Writing, video and audio are archived at www.gregorysmoss.com.
