Ericka Beckman's Super-8 trilogy.
Beckman began making films in the mid-1970s using Super-8 sound film. Neither documentaries nor narratives, these works, as Jim Hoberman puts it, are "like primitive cartoons ... enigmatic allegories filled with nervous activity and comic violence, sexual imagery ... perceptual game playing and ingenious optical effects."
This first anthology brings together three pieces from 1978-1980: We Imitate; We Break Up (1978); The Broken Rule (1979); and Out of Hand (1980), made after her CalArts studies and featuring many other artists as actors.
Ericka Beckman (born 1951 in Hampstead, NY) is an American filmmaker who began to make films in the 1970s as part of the
Pictures Generation. Her playful yet formally
demanding films challenge traditional aesthetic, and cultural values, that
mix games with fairytales to create hybrids with new rules. Beckman uses
play in every sense to shape her message. "The result is
a 'satisfying, even delightful slipperiness of meaning, a mental
vertigo induced by the changefulness of contexts and rules in regard to a
given word or object" (Sally Banes Millenium Film Journal, 1984).
Beckman's work has been shown at festivals, museums, and galleries around
the world. Her one-woman shows include: the Museum of Modern Art, New
York, the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum, Washington,D.C., and the Walker
Art Center, Minneapolis. She has been in three Biennials at the Whitney
Museum of American Art, New York. Amongst the numerous awards received for
her work are: two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, two New
York State Council on the Arts grants, and one from Massachusetts Council
on the Arts. Her works are in the film collection of New York's Museum of
Modern Art, Anthology Film Archives, plus the British Film Institute, as
well as The Walker Art Center Media Collection.
