SELF & other Early Works: There was before Breathless, and there was after Breathless. There was before Close-Up and City Lights, and after them, too. In fact, every movie that avant-garde polymath Ben Creech has seen has its position in the sequence of his experience. A Kentucky native, transplanted to Chicago in the early 10s, Creech restlessly rearranges the detritus of mass culture into ever new frameworks for meaning. In such playful and visionary works as ALREADY BORED, UNIVERSAL, time, and the epic, unfolding SELF, Creech repurposes cinema itself, bending its own materiality toward questions of power, agency, taste, consumption, and the surfaces of culture.