Born in 1955 on the south side of Chicago, where she lived until her teenage years, Beth B. became a known figure after relocating to NYC in the 1970s and attending the School of the Visual Arts. 

Her early filmmaking career was in collaboration with Scott B., with the two of them deeply involved in the vibrant No Wave downtown arts community. With one foot firmly in both the art gallery and the punk gutter, these early collaborative films, such as Black Box, Letters To Dad, and Vortex, felt like the inevitable children of such unlikely parents like the powerfully expressive crudity of Cy Twombly, the overwhelming fascistic minimalism of the Ramones, and the anxious, brooding cynicism of film noir. Shot on Super 8 and 16mm, these films revel in transgression of the psyche as much as the body. 

Once making films and videos on her own her work began to also incorporate gallery/museum film styles, music video aesthetics, video art, and documentary. While the aesthetic elements began to change, the themes remained the same – sex, power, choice, freedom, money, death. Quietly devastating, the films of Beth B. are the flipside to the body obsession of her male No Wave/Cinema of Transgression contemporaries like Richard Kern and Nick Zedd. Not content with mirroring on screen the things that traumatize us, Beth’s films delve further into the unspoken and unrealized things that beget those traumas – and the endless ways we then forever replicate and cope with them. 

These films, made between 1978-1996 features collaborations with such legendary figures as Lydia Lunch, Chloe Dzubilo, Arto Lindsay, Kristian Hoffman, Kembra Pfahler, Lance Loud, Pat Place, Richard Edson, Adele Bertei, and Diego Cortez, among many, many others.

With nearly 50 years having passed since the earliest of her films, and not much changing for the better, it’s quite clear that our society continues to be a festering open wound of trauma, unable to recognize its injuries and their crippling effects. Thankfully we have someone like Beth B. ceaselessly trying to triage and cleanse us through her art.

Beth B., US, 1979-1996, 226 mins total, DCP