Thursday, August 30, 2007
‘I headed out to the strip malls looking for answers … or revenge.” So begins Roger Beebe’s The Strip Mall Trilogy. Set to nauseating beeps and whirs from the checkout line, an onslaught of car bumpers, shopping carts and big brand signage bears down on the viewer like bullets from a gun. The short experimental film is a meditation on what rampant consumer culture has done to the modern landscape, and it’s even entertaining.
As part of the Southern Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers, Beebe will bring most of his back catalogue of alternative cinema to the Manship Theatre at 7:30 p.m. on Sept. 21 for a screening and Q&A session.
The 35-year-old University of Florida film instructor is in the middle of a 55-date tour of his films, but he still finds time to work on new projects. One examines companies that change their names so they will be listed at the beginning of the relevant category in phone book. He discovered one company whose name begins with not one “A,” but 16 of them.
Beebe’s short films vary widely by topic—from technology and gender to random quirks of contemporary culture—and by medium, from home-movie Super 8 to hi-def digital. But two things remain constant. They are all “one-man” movies he can complete himself, and they tend to focus on branding and destroying the myth of common perceptions.
“This tour for me is called New Maps for the New World because I want to redraw the image of the world,” he says. “I try to do something different each time because I’d hate to crank out cliché for the rest of my life.” manshiptheatre.org
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