(Filmmaker in Person)
Best known perhaps for his multiple-projector performances, filmmaker/curator/professor Roger Beebe returns to the road in January 2015 for a four-month tour that takes him to three corners of North America including his first visit to Tucson! While this tour does feature several of his best-known projector performances (including the six-projector show-stopping space jam “Last Light of a Dying Star”), it places those works in the context of a broader practice of appropriation of educational/industrial/mass cultural imagery. These works cover a range of topics from black athletes with Irish surnames (“Famous Irish Americans”) and the secret logic of the book of Genesis (“Beginnings”) to Las Vegas suicides (“Money Changes Everything”) and companies jockeying to be at the start of the phone book (“AAAAA Motion Picture”). The program also includes his most recent video, “Historia Calamitatum (The Story of My Misfortunes), Part II: The Crying Game,” (award winner at a number of festivals including Chicago Underground, IC Docs, and Milwaukee Underground), which explores the forbidden pleasures of male tears.