Robert Beavers (born 1949 in Brookline, Massachusetts) is an American experimental filmmaker. He attended Deerfield Academy which he left before graduating to move to New York in 1965 to pursue filmmaking. He lived in New York until 1967 when he and his partner, Gregory Markopoulos, left the United States for Europe, where they continued to live and make films until Markopoulos' death in 1992.
“Forgoes the geometric severity characteristic of works like his masterly ars poetic From the Notebook of… without any loss of precision, and generates a subsumed aura of rapture nearly as potent as his sublime city/nature diptych The Stoas.”
Nathan Lee, Village Voice, on Pitcher of Colored Light
This career retrospective, combined with a filmmaker residency, offers Bay Area audiences a chance to see American avant-garde filmmaker Robert Beavers’s highly rewarding body of work and engage with him as an artist. His films are exceptional for their visual beauty, aural texture, and depth of emotional expression.
Dates:
Friday, January 30, 2026 (All day) to Saturday, February 7, 2026 (All day)
Gregory J. Markopoulos Film as Film, Archive as Creation An exhibition by François Bovier, with the participation of Robert Beavers, filmmaker and curator of the Temenos archive Parallel exhibition at the Kunsthaus Biel Art Center Biel (KBCB)
Dates:
Saturday, June 7, 2025 (All day) to Saturday, August 30, 2025 (All day)
Under the banner of ‘film as film’, the absolute cinema of Greek-American Gregory J. Markopoulos (1928–1992) alternates between fixed sequence shots and autonomous photograms. His work is based on portraits of people and places, and partly on adaptations of Hellenic myths. His last epic work, Eniaios (1948–1990, approx. 80 hours), reassembles his earlier films in a new order, combining them with new ones shot for the occasion. Since 2004, the restored work has been screened every four years at Temenos, an open-air utopian projection space in Greece.
Dates:
Sunday, June 8, 2025 (All day) to Sunday, August 31, 2025 (All day)
Doc Films is proud to present, for our very last screening of the quarter, six films by filmmaker Robert Beavers. Pitcher of Colored Light and The Suppliant were filmed in the United States during Beavers’s trips, while Listening to the Space in My Room and “Der Klang, die Welt…” were made while Beavers lived and worked in Zumikon. Among the Eucalyptuses and The Sparrow Dream are some of his more recent works.
altriformati is presenting the screening of Robert Beavers’ Ruskin (1974/1997) in 35mm and Oleg Tcherny’s Flashback Legion (2016) in digital format, as part of the event:
"Ruskin's Camera Eye: La Venezia di John Ruskin e il cinema indipendente"
The screening will be followed by "Adattamenti: film d’arte e la città", a round table with Robert Beavers, Alessandra Lancellotti, Oleg Tcherny, Enrico Camporesi, Martina Frank, Enrico Masi, Flavia Mazzarino.
Gregory J. Markopoulos. Filmmaker, born in Toledo, Ohio, 1928, died in Freiburg im Breisgau 1992
Sorrows 1969, 16mm, color, opt. sound. 6 min. “A powerful mood piece, it uses only the light and color emanating from the enclosed surroundings and selected objects… It evokes, without the presence of a single ‘living’ being, the reality of a life or lives, passing yet present, persistent, like a fragrance,reverberating with continued expectation. “ Kirk Winslow https://www.thetemenos.org/
