Mills Folly Microcinema

×

Expand

Wes Kline

Filmmaker Roger Beebe in action.

Mills Folly Microcinema returns for fall with a special program featuring the work of filmmaker Roger Beebe, who will present a selection of his 16mm works. The program title is no joke; Beebe's films often use multiple projectors at once to explore and/or explode American empire and late capitalism. Several newer creations will be screened as well as acclaimed past works such as Last Light of a Dying Star.

press release: Join us for the reboot of Mills Folly Microcinema, the monthly showcase of experimental film and video presented by Arts + Literature Laboratory. Mills Folly Microcinema will present "Films for One to Eight Projectors: Roger Beebe in Person," on Monday, November 8 at 7:30 p.m. Admission is $5, or free for Arts + Literature Laboratory members. Seating is limited, and doors open at 7:15 p.m.

In the wake of our year(+) of lockdown and of telepresence, Roger Beebe returns to the road with a program of 16mm multi-projector performances and will make his first stop in Madison in more than 12 years.  The program features several newer works (Lineage (for Norman McLaren) (2019, 4 x 16mm), de rerum natura (2019, 3 x 16mm + video), Home Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry (2021, 4 x 16mm), alongside some of his best-known projector performances (including the seven-projector show-stopping Last Light of a Dying Star (2008/2011)).  He will also include a sampling of recent essayistic videos, presented as live-narrated documentaries. These works take on a range of topics from the forbidden pleasures of men crying (Historia Calamitatum (The Story of My Misfortunes)) to the racial politics of font choices (The Comic Sans Video) and the real spaces of the virtual economy (Amazonia).

“Beebe’s films are both erudite and punk, lo-fi yet high-brow shorts that wrestle with a disfigured, contemporary American landscape.” --Wyatt Williams, Creative Loafing (Atlanta)

"[Beebe’s films] implicitly and explicitly evoke the work of Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, all photographers of the atomic age whose Western photographs captured the banalities, cruelties and beauties of imperial America." --David Fellerath, The Independent Weekly

Roger Beebe is a filmmaker whose work since 2006 consists primarily of multiple-projector performances and essayistic videos that explore the world of found images and the "found" landscapes of late capitalism. He has screened his films around the globe at such unlikely venues as the CBS Jumbotron in Times Square and McMurdo Station in Antarctica as well as more likely ones including Sundance and the Museum of Modern Art with solo shows at Anthology Film Archives, The Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico City, and Los Angeles Filmforum among many other venues. Beebe is also a film programmer: he ran Flicker, a festival of small-gauge film in Chapel Hill, NC, from 1997-2000 and was the founder and Artistic Director of FLEX, the Florida Experimental Film Festival from 2004-2014. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Art at the Ohio State University.

Mills Folly Microcinema showcases nationally recognized experimental film and video art work from the festival and microcinema circuit. We network with regional filmmakers and organizations to bring filmmakers and guest programmers to Madison for screenings. And we incubate local experimental filmmaking by providing screen time at at Project Projection events.