March 7, Thursday, 8PM, 2002
Director's Eye: Ericka Beckman

I see film as an art form and make experimental films that are inspired by games, folklore and fairy-tale structures, and try to develope as much material from my imagination as I do from the real world. - Ericka Beckman

Ericka Beckman makes movies that are playful in the most liberal sense. Boldly colored and cheerfully self-absorbed, they take their structure, rhythm, and imagery from games. Given the difficulties inherent in avant garde film production, Beckman's work is improbably optimistic - it seems to celebrate its own coming into existence. There is something undeniably calisthenic about her vision, which is characterized by exhoratory chants repetitive gestures, and the iconic use of sports equipment and cheerleaders. Beckman's roots are in the art world. She began making movies in the mid 1970s using the then new technology of sync-sound super 8. Her first films were neither documentaries nor narratives, but rather idiosyncratic constructions that triumphed over the limitations of the narrow-gauge format with their ingenious homemade special effects. (...) If Beckman's narratives are often cryptic, her work is preoccupied by a recurring core of themes - competition, cognition, role-playing, and what she's called "the coordination of the self in the physical world." -- J. Hoberman

Switch Center 8min, 16mm 2001

This film is a tribute to the Soviet architecture of the future, and at the same time a reaction to seeing it be transitioned to shopping malls or global corporate office structures. I was invited by Balazs Bela Studio in Budapest, Hungary to produce a short experimental film there. I was the first American artist to be invited by this famous film collective after the fall of Soviet power. The collaboration took place in August 2000, culminating in a 10 minute color 16mm film. SWITCH CENTER is an experimental document shot in many defunct Danube Water Works locations on the outskirts of Budapest. It includes many old water towers and a 1960's water purification plant which was left in perfect condition for 25 years. The architecture inspired me to make a document of the factory, to recreate the workings there in sight and sound. Many of Budapest's industrial sites, which were built during their soviet occupation, are now being demolished or bought up by commercial interests. While I was meditating on the animation of 6 story water tank, a Pokemon commercial was being filmed down the corridor.

Cinderella 25min, 16mm 1986

In a musical treatment of the original fairytale, Ericka Beckman's CINDERELLA breaks apart the story and sets it to the mechanical repeats of a game, where Cinderella is projected like a ping-pong ball back and forth from the hearth to the castle, never succeeding in fulfilling the requirement of "the Cinderella." The bewitching hour arrives again and again, always too late. Mixing genres, the film begins on a naturalistic outdoor setting, and then into animation and computer graphics, becoming progressively more abstract and creating a delirious terrain that teeters on its internal logic and manic rhythms. A departure from Ericka Beckman's early non-narrative work, CINDERELLA approaches a full-blown musical production, replete with narrative closure and lip-sync delivery of the soundtrack, written collaboratively by Beckman and Brooke Halpin.

"Although no less fraught with psychodrama than Disney's, Ericka Beckman's CINDERELLA drops the sibling rivalry and Oedipal underpinnings, boiling the material down to an enigmatic meditation on the nature of socialization - while exhibiting the filmmaker's characteristic use of pinball imagery, stutter-stop development, incantatory songs, and dreamlike condensation." - J. Hoberman

Hiatus 30min, 16mm, 1999

Madi plays an interactive on-line computer game in a privacy of her apartment. Wearing a computer corset that stores her programs in a "garden interface", she propels her gogocowgirl construct Wonder through the game world, encountering an assortment of logged on players and game identities who trick and confuse her. An aggressive male character Wang logs on, and inserts his cold architecture into her coordinates draining the power in her corset. To confront this powerful takeover artist, she must rely on her organic memory and is forced to establish some boundaries to protect her identity and preserve her freedom.

You the better 30min, 16mm, 1983