Avant-garde filmmaker Robert Beavers has been on a 60-year search for cinematic form. Following the timeline of his own filmmaking, Beavers will discuss technique and his many lauded experiments with 16mm and 35mm filmmaking. His talk will include rare excerpts and fragments of selected films that span his career, starting in 1966 with work inspired by the New American Cinema and related artists—including Gregrory J.Markopoulos, with whom Beavers moved to Greece in 1967. 

Following his talk, join us for a program of five completed films by Robert Beavers, projected in original format. 

Early Monthly Segments (1968–70/2002, 16mm, silent, 33 minutes)
“Early Monthly Segments, filmed when Beavers was 18 and 19 years old, now forms the opening to his film cycle, My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure. It is a highly stylized work of self-portraiture, depicting filmmaker and companion Gregory J. Markopoulos in their Swiss apartment. The film functions as a diary, capturing aspects of home life with precise attention to detail, documenting the familiar with great love and transforming objects and ordinary personal effects into a highly charged work of homoeroticism.” 
—Susan Oxtoby, Toronto International Film Festival 

Work done (1972/1999, 35mm, 22 minutes)
“Bracing in its simplicity, Work done was shot in Florence and the Alps, and celebrates an archaic Europe. Contemplating a stone vault cooled by blocks of ice or handstitching of a massive tome or the frying of a local delicacy, Beavers considers human activities without dwelling on human protagonists. Like many of Beavers’ films, Work done is based on a series of textural transformative equivalences: the workshop and the field, the book and the forest, the mound of cobblestones and a distant mountain.” 
—J. Hoberman, The Village Voice

The Suppliant (2010, 35mm, 5 minutes)
“An exquisitely wrought, five-minute portrait, both of the small statue of the title and of the artist/friend in whose apartment it resides. Its arms raised in appeal to an absent being—perhaps a deity, or, as the shot of the figure seen from the back implies, the radiant sun that blazes through the windows—the figure is crosscut with an unmade bed, an anatomical drawing, a painting of a male nude, and views of Lower Manhattan seen from a nearby Brooklyn promenade…Sounds are minimal and precise: A gentle scratching suggests the friend at work, perhaps shading in a pencil sketch. Without a single shot of the apartment’s occupant, images and sounds carve a portrait of a solitary life comforted by art.”
—Tony Pipolo, Artforum

Listening to the Space in My Room (2013, 16mm, 19 minutes)
“Imagine someone boiling down all the impermanent sensations, routines, memories, and emotions that make a home a home into an intensely flavorful reduction, and you begin to understand Beavers’ stunning film. He and his housemates are crystallized at work: the camera sways with the hands of an older man bowing his cello; observes an older woman tending her garden from inside the darkened house; mirrors Beavers himself examining individual frames of film to stage his somatic cuts. The intricately interlaid tracks of sound and image do not abide any standard measure of continuity, and yet there’s something immediately comprehensible in this exquisitely tuned song of the body in space.”
—Max Goldberg, Fandor 

Der Klang, die Welt… (The Sound, the World, 2018, 16mm, 5 minutes)
This film was “intended as a gift to my landlady Cécile Staehelin, after her husband Dieter Staehelin had died. Dieter is speaking in the film about the place of music in his life, while we see him and Cécile performing an ‘Arabesque’ by Bohuslav Martinů. She once mentioned the wish for her life to end like the last notes in this piece of music.”
—Robert Beavers

About Robert Beavers