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, FL.

ABOUT THE FILMS

Last Light of a Dying Star (2008, 4 X 16MM, 3 X VIDEO, 1 X SUPER 8MM, 30 min.) A multi-projector meditation on the passage from film to video, from abstraction to representation, and from the technological wonder of space exploration to the banality of the digital snapshot. Originally made for an installation/performance in a planetarium at the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Macon, GA, the film attempts to recapture some of the excitement of the early days of space exploration and the utopian aspirations of expanded cinema. Made as an orchestration of a number of different elements, made and found: handmade cameraless film loops by Beebe and Jodie Mack; striking sequences of digital stills by Cassandra C. Jones; 16mm educational films about eclipses, asteroids, comets, and meteorites; and a super 8 print of the East German animated film "The Drunk Sun."
Money Changes Everything (2009, 3 X 16MM, 5 min.) Three days in Las Vegas, Nevada, and three different visions of the discarded past and the constantly renewed future. A three-part portrait of a town in transformation: a suburban utopia in the desert, a cancerous sprawl of unplanned development, a destination for suicides.
TB TX DANCE (2006, 2 X 16MM, 3 min.) A cameraless film made on a black & white laser printer with an optical soundtrack made of dots of varying sizes provides the backdrop for revisiting Toni Basil's appearance in Bruce Conner's 1968 film "Breakaway." Commissioned as part of Mike Plante's Lunchfilm series, where filmmakers are asked to make films for less than the price of the lunch they've just been treated to. (This film's budget was $32.37 worth of pulled pork sandwiches and peach cobbler.)
The Strip Mall Trilogy (2001, 1 X SUPER 8MM/1 X VIDEO, 9 min.) A look straight into the heart of the most postmodern of architectural forms, the strip mall, shot in a mile-long parking lot that could be Anywhere, USA. "He has actually managed to bust apart the mind-controlling code of relentlessly commercial space and reconfigure it into a landscape of beautiful colors and forms. It is a remarkable piece of Super 8 alchemy." --David Finkelstein, Film Threat