2025 Theses Doctoral

Who Speaks: Ericka Beckman’s Super-8 Trilogy

Marshall, Janina Piper

This dissertation investigates the early films of Ericka Beckman made between the years 1977-1980 in the United States.

Collaborator of Mike Kelley and Dan Graham and colleague of James Welling and Tony Conrad, Beckman exerted influence in the art communities of New York and California. At the outset of her career, critics heralded Beckman as a vanguard filmmaker. Yet, she was also deposited outside of prominent discourses, such as Pictures, in art history and the New Talkies in cinema studies. Rather than constrain Beckman’s output to an extent genre, this dissertation argues that her films surpass and thus undermine discursive boundaries. A reader of child psychologist Jean Piaget, Beckman’s research led her to the potent and disciplinary force of children’s material.

Deploying lullaby, play, and reverie in 8mm, Beckman’s trilogy of films unsettle conversations about imagination, vision, and memory, which have long been the concerns of art history from the nineteenth century forward. Calibrating between the framework of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari for a “minor artist” and the notion of Julia Kristeva that “major” accounts uphold specific, normative readers, I argue that Beckman transforms the gauges of advanced discourse and alters the subjectivity of her constituents in the process.