SOUNDFILM 2015

Directed by Roger Beebe

A six-projector 16mm film performance, exploring the history of sound recording and the ways in which sound is represented as image. Composed primarily of fragments of 16mm educational films stretching from the 1940s through the 1980s,SOUNDFILM creates a complex visual and sonic space in which these fragments, starting with a compendium of elementary sound primers, coalesce around various key moments and strategies: representations of the vibrations of air particles, anatomical animations of the middle and inner ear, noise and hearing protection, and the technologies for representing sound (optical tracks, oscilloscopes, etc.). Simultaneously, however, the film explores and plays with a certain degree of abstraction that happens in these representations, at times liberating sound and image for their sensual qualities alone. In these sections it also references American minimalist composition with phase shifts and repetitions that recall the work of Steve Reich.