Every Tuesday night for more than a hex of years, the RBMC illuminated the snowy-white screen of the Collective Unconscious on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Initiated by Brian Frye & immediately joined by Bradley Eros, both shared the core curating frenzy of this no-budget operation, managing to produce over 300 programs and exhibiting more than a thousand artists. When Frye left, it relocated & regrouped, mutating into Roberta Beck Mercurial Cinema at Participant Inc’s gallery just around the corner, for a year, with a team of at least six, but primarily & irrepressibly Eros & Joel Schlemowitz. It later became a restless, nomadic cinema, mushrooming & mutating in myriad incarnations, most notoriously at Issue Project Room on the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, both indoors and out. Lastly, it explored more artworld and musical contexts, transforming the field of experimental film, as both quixotic and quicksilver.
Bradley Eros: An artist working in myriad media: experimental film & video, collage, photography, performance, sound, text, contracted and expanded cinema and installation. Also a maverick curator, composer, designer & investigator. Concepts include: ephemeral cinema, mediamystics, subterranean science, erotic psyche, cinema povera, poetic accidents, and musique plastique. Work has been exhibited at Whitney Biennial & The American Century MoMA, Performa09, The New York, London, and Rotterdam Film Festivals, The Kitchen, and Microscope Gallery. Worked for many years with the New York Filmmakers’ Cooperative, Anthology Film Archives & co-directed the Robert Beck Memorial/Roberta Beck Mercurial Cinema.
Brian L. Frye is a filmmaker, writer and law professor. His films explore relationships between history, society, and cinema through archival and amateur images. His films have appeared in places like The Whitney Biennial, New York Film Festival’s “Views from the Avant-Garde”, New York Underground Film Festival, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Warhol Museum, Pleasure Dome, Media City and Images Festival. His short films are in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum and distributed by the Filmmaker’s Coop. He’s been awarded grants from the Jerome Foundation and ETC. His writing on film and art has appeared in October, The New Republic, Film Comment, Cineaste, Millennium Film Journal and the Village Voice. He is currently a visiting assistant professor at Hofstra Law School and is developing a beer-brewing hobby.
Jon Dieringer is a programmer, writer, filmmaker, and media conservator. As the editor and publisher of Screen Slate, Dieringer provides a daily resource for listings and commentary on New York City moving image culture. He is also one of the principle programmers, administrators, and trailer editors at Brooklyn’s Spectacle and has additionally organized screenings at 92YTribeca, Anthology Film Archives, The International House, The Museum of Arts and Design, and UnionDocs. His collaborative videos, often brain-burning takes on the shape and construction of meaning through popular reappropriation, have screened at Anthology, Flux Factory, MAD, MoMA PS1, The Nightingale (Chicago), and Spectacle. Dieringer has also written for TIME.com, TIME Magazine’s LightBox, and INCITE Journal of Experimental Media. Professionally, he is the Technical Director at Electronic Arts Intermix—following in the lineage of unintended RMBC namesake, video artist Robert Beck.
