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.
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/
While Robert Beavers’s body of work ranks among the most revered in the canon of avant-garde cinema, his films are more often spoken or written about than seen. Opportunities to view them here in the U.S. – especially all together – have come around no more than once in a blue moon, with the only large-scale retrospectives on these shores taking place at the Whitney Museum in 2005 and at various venues in the Bay Area in 2009.
Dates:
Thursday, September 26, 2024 (All day) to Sunday, September 29, 2024 (All day)
MoMA presents the world premiere of Robert Beavers’s most recent film, Dedication: Bernice Hodges (2024), presented alongside Early Month Segments (1968–70/2002) and Pitcher of Colored Light (2000–07). Following the screening, which also celebrates Rebekah Rutkoff’s new book Double Vision: The Cinema of Robert Beavers (2024), Beavers and Rutkoff will participate in a conversation moderated by MoMA curator Joshua Siegel.
