On Sunday April 12 the Weitz Cinema was geared up with seven film projectors that have traveled across the country and Canada with filmmaker/ curator/ professor Roger Beebe in his touring program of short films and videos. “Films for One to Eight Projectors: multi-projector experiments by Roger Beebe” was a spectacle both on-screen as well as in the mid-section of the cinema’s seating area, where Roger deftly operated a row of six 16mm projectors, one super-8mm projector, a sound mixer and a lap-top. The resulting performance of multi-channel imagery and sound – a mix of celluloid, optical sound and digital imagery – filled the cinema with found and original film and video footage and camera-less film loops that re-imagined the early days of space exploration, the taboo of men crying, and the city of Las Vegas. After the screening, the excited CAMS and general audience engaged in a lively discussion with Roger while he re-wound the dozens of reels of films that comprised this marvelous experience. The event was sponsored by CAMS, International Film Forum, The Committee on Studies for the Arts and the Humanities Center with an introduction by Professor Rini Keagy from CAMS.
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 recent solo shows at the Laboratorio Arte Alameda (Mexico City), the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Anthology Film Archives, and dozens of other venues. He has won numerous honors and awards, including a 2013 MacDowell Colony residency, 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.