Every Tuesday night for more than a hex of years, the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema 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, it relocated & regrouped, 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 & Joel Schlemowitz. It later became a restless, nomadic cinema, mushrooming & mutating in myriad incarnations, most notoriously at Issue Project Room on the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, both indoors and out. Lastly, it explored more artworld and musical contexts, transforming the field of experimental film, as both quixotic and quicksilver.

To celebrate our sixth anniversary we’ve assembled an evening of determined visual magic, radical geometry and single frame exaltation. Takashi Ito’s sublime Spacy uses the Droste effect (or mise-en-abyme), to turn 700 photographs of a gymnasium into a glorious ten-minute kinetic voyage. Paul Sharits’s seminal Ray Gun Virus is a colour field flicker film that offers a visceral palette of sensory pleasures. Rose Lowder’s Scenes de la vie francaise: La Ciotat is from her four-part series “Scenes de la vie francaise” which references the Lumieres and shows two versions of the same scene, shot frame by frame acutely examining the impact of scale, duration and time. La Ciotat features animated landscapes of the port, dry docks, shipyard workers, launched tankers, fishermen and the beach, showing us contrasting views of the Cote d’Azur port city with graceful perception.