Robert Beck Memorial Cinema: Weekly Visit to the Supernal Realms

(This article originally appeared in the book captured: a film/video history of the lower east side by Clayton Patterson.)

Every Tuesday evening, without fail, the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema lights up the ample screen of the Collective Unconscious at 145 Ludlow Street with shadows, visions, primal screams, mathematical musings, and personal revelations. Hungry eyeballs are satisfied with endless investigations of the play of light and color. Starving ears are fulfilled with electronica and subtly altered birdsong.

Informal, guaranteed to start a bit late and go a bit longer than necessary, the Beck has provided me over the past year with an oasis where film and video is allowed to speak with a personal, rather than a corporate voice. I have seen found footage films, where old 16mm reels explaining the life cycles of rats have been scratched, bleached, blacked out, and otherwise altered, in silent explorations that reveal the teeming life and energy hidden in the mundane. I have seen surreal collages in which women writhe on Tibetan prayer wheels, and shadow plays in which men are transformed into birds. I have seen glorious celebrations of fucking, and cries of sexual rage and fear. A mock documentary in which an underground cult of desperately ill people cure themselves by using toxic waste. An exploration of the vastness of an American military compound, and George W. transformed into a teletubby.

I have seen film projected into broken mirrors, so that it flies off of the screen and onto the ceiling, walls, and floor. Film projected on smoke, through tissue paper, film mixed from an orchestra of projectors into a live, improvised collage. I have been invited to sit around a 'campfire' and watch an installation of films about hoboes, to join in birthday celebrations and memorials, and to get myself stoned and dive into psychedelic bliss. One Tuesday, after seeing some fine films and enjoying cake and wine in celebration of Robert Beck host Bradley Eros' 50th birthday, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that projectionist extraordinaire Joel Schlemowitz was waltzing around the space with a movie camera. Several months later, at a special benefit screening for the Beck at Galapagos in Williamsburg, the resultant film, The Birth of Eros, was premiered, and I found myself watching myself on the screen, along with the other celebrants.

I have also seen a few truly terrible films, but remarkably few, considering the far-ranging and risky nature of the Beck's presentations. I have seen a wonderful show as part of an audience of two, followed the next week by a wonderful show with so many in attendance that people were stuffed into every available inch of space and into the projection booth, and still had to be turned away at the door.

And who, people inevitably ask, was this Robert Beck who is being so extravagantly memorialized? (Recently, the Cinema has been referred to on occasion as the 'Roberta Beck.' It is only fitting that a venue which is so dedicated to personal redefinition should itself be transgendered.) This question is answered in not one, but a whole series of short films produced by members of the Beck collective. A soldier in World War One, Beck suffered from hysterical blindness and deafness as a result of shell shock. On a trip from his sanatorium to a movie theater, a Buster Keaton film caused Beck to begin laughing and spontaneously recover his sight and hearing. Thus, the healing and redemptive power of film art is fittingly celebrated at a weekly temple for cinephiles on the Lower East Side.

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