Washing machines line the walls of Dirty Dungarees on Monday. Credit: Daniel Bush | Campus Photo Editor
Over the hum of washing and drying machines, film students and other spectators will gather at Dirty Dungarees, a laundromat and live music venue north of campus, on Tuesday to take part in an interactive cinema experience with gongs, organized by Roger Beebe.
Beebe, a professor of media and film studies in addition to literature, is putting on the event for students of Art 5009 — a Film/Video III course focusing on expanded cinema — however all members of the public are welcome.
A selection from Beebe’s collection of 16mm educational films will play at 8 p.m. Audience members will have access to a gong, which they are encouraged to bang when a film bores them. No matter who bangs the gong, the film must be switched out for a new one, which the audience will select based on the title.
Beebe said he took inspiration from the 1970s amateur talent contest show, “The Gong Show,” wanting to find a way to engage audiences while exploring media that may be dull at times.
“These educational films often sound really exciting, and when you start watching them you realize pretty quickly that they’re not always great,” Beebe said.
The audience will have about 100 films to choose from, created between the 1930s and 1980s, Beebe said. He said his collection, a term he prefers over “archive” — which denotes exceptional standards of care for the material — has been sourced from public libraries, primary schools and colleges.
“I’ve just become a kind of place that people send films when they no longer want to keep them in their closet,” Beebe said. For Beebe, the collection is “sort of [his] baby — no one else here is working in 16mm still.”
The full collection is dispersed between the Theatre, Film, and Media Arts building and Hopkins Hall, according to Tristan Turner, an MFA student and filmmaker.
“So these orphan films that nobody really wants to take care of … where do they go?” Turner said. “Oftentimes, they go into the trash can, but they can be creatively repurposed and saved.”
Art 5009, or “expanded cinema,” is a course Beebe teaches every five years. Turner said the course is “experiential and very location based.”
“‘Expanded cinema tests the boundaries of what the conventional viewing experience is,” Turner said.
Turner said the large gaps in the class’ availability is due to the intense workload required.
“For [Beebe], the instructor, I think it’s an extremely involved class that has to revolve around performances and coordination with the entire class, securing venues, inviting guests from out of town,” Turner said.
Beebe and Turner said they both hope to see non-film students in attendance.
“I mean, I love doing this stuff,” Beebe said. “We have so many prints … over a couple hours we’ll get through 20 or 30 of the 100 films that we bring. There’s a deep, deep resource to keep drawing from. I’d love to keep doing this kind of stuff again, even once the semester is over.”
