Super-8/color/sound
30 minutes
1976

Produced, directed, shot and edited by Ericka Beckman
Starring Paul Mc Mahon
Featuring James Welling, Matt Mullican, Nancy Chunn, April Gornik
Music and vocals by Beckman/Brooke Halpin

“The final film in a trilogy inspired by the writings of Piaget, Out of Hand is a quest film. A small boy searching for a missing object follows cues and memory aids, questioning the distinction between ‘what it is’ and ‘where it is’.” — EB

“Out of Hand is magical. It combines and condenses formats and images from both myth’s and children’s fantasies. Its rhetoric is sophisticated, creating metaphors for consciousness, memory, and symbol-making processes, but at the same time it is basic and child-like. The underlying magical effect is that the boy (played by Paul McMahon) creates not only the fantastic worlds within these mundane objects, but even ‘reality’ itself, out of a few colored blocks; but although he has brought them into being, they assume lives of their own, beyond his control.” — Sally Banes, Millennium Film Journal, 1984.

“Ericka Beckman is one of the most accomplished of younger filmmakers. The five super-8 films she released since 1977 can be located at the “perceptual edge” of Post-structural Punk; they’re not absolute rejections of 70’s formalism. Beckman’s work has affinities to certain films of George Landow and the trickier sections of Robert Nelson and William Wiley’s The Great Blondino, but basically she is an idiosyncratic original with a full-blown out style of her own…Like primitive cartoons, Beckman’s enigmatic allegories are filled with nervous activity and comic violence, sexual imagery and syncopated energy, perceptual game-playing and ingenious homemade optical effects. Her major thematic preoccupations include “ the coordination of the self in the physical world”. There is something undeniably callisthenic about her vision. Singsong voice tracks, jerky robot motions, repetitive gestures and the iconic use of sports equipment and cheerleaders characterize Beckman’s mise en scene. Beckman frequently links her work to Piaget but, with its obsessive images of property and loss, Out of Hand is an Allstate Insurance commercial as it might appear to an autistic child.” — J. Hoberman, Artforum January 1981

• Hoberman, J. VULGAR MODERNISM, 1991
• Banes, Sally. “Imagination and Play: The Films of Ericka Beckman.” MILLENNIUM FILM JOURNAL, Winter, 1984
• Gross, Linda. “Quirk Ethic of Ericka Beckman.” LOS ANGELES TIMES, April, 1979
• Hoberman, J. “Encore Series: Ericka Beckman.” (series document)
• Taubin, Amy. “Fascinating Fragments: Two Films by Ericka Beckman.” SOHO WEEKLY NEWS”