“Living’s only true terror is the lack of ecstacy.”
-Kathy Acker
The Robert(a) Beck Memorial (Mercurial) Cinema will celebrate its 10th anniversary on May 16th during ISSUE Project Room’s month of ecstasy! An ouroboric event organized by Bradley Eros, Brian Frye & Joel Schlemowitz.
We will gather all the mercurial ones, remember all the memorial ones, and play with all the players, inviting works by and about RBMC from all our former members: works of music & pleasure, lost and regained senses & sensuality, sexperimental sinema, and ecstacy without agony. We will feature clips from the very first and very last shows, as well as commissioned trailers, performances, posters, and the infamous legend of the sanitarium. A night of celebration & cerebrum!
XS & XTC
Xistence in the Xtreme. We are Xcommunicated from the
Xcruciating norm. In our Xile, we Xcavate the
Xocentric. As ‘pataphysicians, we Xalt the science of
Xceptions: X-raying the myths to Xcrete blood from the
language of Xchange. This is our Xpression of XS,
Xterminating angels while Xposing our XTC!
RBMC = Robert Beck Memorial Cinema / Roberta Beck
Mercurial Cinema
Mission Statement:
The RBMC provides a laboratory for the auto-didact, a genuine Temporary Autonomous Zone for cine-mavericks and metaphysicians and a realm to disorder and regain the senses. As a micro-cinema haven for experimental film, we seek the radical in form and content: the poetic, personal & eccentric; hand-made and found-footage; hybrid works with forays into oddball genres, like subterranean science, subversive history, and erotic mystery, from the abject to the obsolete.
We favor expanded cinema & video performances, paracinema & the ephemeral, artisan films & found gems. A true cinema of the worm: fertile, underground, culture.
Our motto: ‘ubi mel ibi apes’ (”where there’s honey, there will be bees”.)
Organization History:
Every Tuesday night for more than a hex of years (1998-2004), the RBMC illuminated the snowy-white screen of the Collective:Unconscious on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Initiated by Brian Frye & immediately joined by Bradley Eros, both shared the core curating frenzy of this no-budget operation, managing to produce over 300 programs and exhibiting more than a thousand artists. When Frye left (for ‘legal’ reasons), we relocated & regrouped, (trans-)mutating into Roberta Beck Mercurial Cinema at Participant Inc’s gallery just around the corner, for a year, with a team of at least six, but primarily & irrepressibly Eros and Joel Schlemowitz. We are now a restless, nomadic cinema, mushrooming & mutating into myriad incarnations, but most notoriously at Issue Project Room, both indoors and out, near the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn.
Bradley Eros:
An artist working in myriad media: experimental film & video, collage, photography, performance, sound, text, expanded cinema & installation. Also a maverick curator, designer, researcher & investigator. Concepts include: ephemeral cinema, mediamystics, subterranean science, erotic psyche, poetic accidents, and cinema povera.
Brian Frye is a filmmaker, programmer, writer & lawyer. He initiated the RBMC and screened Nixon’s “Checker’s Speech” & de Antonio’s “Underground” on the first night. An open dialogue from the beginning…
Joel Schlemowitz has made over forty short experimental films, and numerous film installation pieces. His work has been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, Anthology Film Archives, Millennium Film Workshop, Berks Filmmakers, and various festivals. He teaches filmmaking at the New School, where he is passionately involved with the union. He is an inspired tinkerer in arcane media and has made many poetic films & films of poetry.