Associated with the Pictures Generation and the activities of CalArts in the 1970s, Beckman’s manic, real-virtual, highly symbolic films – which take video games, learning games, sports and even roulette as thematic motors – seem to have presaged the life-games we now waddle within.
Up until 2000 all my work was produced in my black box studio. I controlled the frame by building everything in the frame. I worked with props, animations, and miniature sets, as well as lyrics, graphics and visual text.
"More innovative uses of super-8 sound began to appear in the late Seventies, Ericka Beckman's idiosyncratic films—White Man Has Clean Hands (1977), We Imitate; We Break-Up (1978)..."
"Ericka Beckman's Super-8 labyrinthine movies, which screen Sunday at 8 p.m. at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art (LAICA), 2020 S. Robertson, are fascinating..."