Despite the postmodern critique of authenticity and originality, which was supposed to have carried the day decades ago, significant parts of the experimental film community continue to operate under the terms of a classic Romanticism that values and valorizes the Creative Genius who makes a New World in his films out of Whole Cloth.  That persistent Romantic ideal finds itself reinforced by another supposedly outdated project:  the Modernist desire to “Make it New!”  Experimental film, in stressing a (problematic) ideology of innovation and novelty rather than tradition and influence, creates an environment in which avowing influence and the many borrowings from tradition can produce considerable anxiety.  This program attempts to run headlong into that anxiety-inducing embrace of tradition, laying bare the places in my work where influence is most apparent.  Each of my films is paired with a film from which I’ve intentionally or unconsciously borrowed considerably in an attempt to overcome this Anxiety of Influence. – Roger Beebe

Beebe will be joined by filmmakers Ben Coonley and Jim Finn to discuss the films and the broader implications of the program in a post-screening talk.

Program Details:

RIVER RITES (Ben Russell, 2011, 11:30, super 16mm on HD video)

Hwa Shan District, Taipei (Bernhard Schreiner, 2000, 13:00, 16mm)

Qaeda Quality Question Quickly Quickly Quiet (Lenka Clayton, 2002, 18:00, SD video)

Only (Chris Jolly, 1997, 3:20, super 8mm)

The Strip Mall Trilogy (Roger Beebe, 2001, 9:10, super 8mm)

Beginnings (Roger Beebe, 2010, rev. 2011, 5:40, audio)

S A V E (Roger Beebe, 2006, 5:15, 16mm)

REVERSED RITES/RIVER RIGHTED (Roger Beebe, 2015, 11:30, HD)

Roger Beebe is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art at the Ohio State University. He has screened his films around the globe with solo shows at the Laboratorio Arte Alameda (Mexico City), LA Filmforum, Anthology Film Archives, and dozens of other venues. He has won numerous honors and awards including a 2013 MacDowell Colony residency and a 2009 Visiting Foreign Artists Grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. http://www.rogerbeebe.com/

Jim Finn: “Steeped in the obsolete language of revolutionary art,” The New York Times said Jim Finn’s films “often play like unearthed artifacts from an alternate universe.” His movies have been called “Utopian comedies” and “trompe l’oeil films.” Born in 1968, he lives, teaches and raises small humans in Brooklyn.

Ben Coonley is an artist working with video, computers, 3D, and cats. His work has been screened in venues including BAM’s 2015 “3D in the 21st Century” series, MoMA PS1’s “Greater New York: Cinema”, Performa, the New Museum, the Moscow Biennale, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. In 2010, he was named one of Film Comment’s “21 Leading Lights of Projection Performance”. Coonley studied Art Semiotics as an undergraduate at Brown University, and received an MFA from Bard College in 2003. Coonley was born in Boston, MA and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.