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.

Born in 1949 in Brookline, Massachusetts, Beavers began to make films in the mid-1960s in New York City. By the end of that decade, he had relocated to Europe with fellow American filmmaker Gregory J. Markopoulos, who would be his lifelong companion until Markopoulos’s death in 1992. The majority of Beavers’s films were shot in the 1970s and 1980s in Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and Greece. Between 1994 and 2002, the artist involved himself in reediting the images and creating new soundtracks for his eighteen-film cycle, My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure.

Beavers’s films embody the ideals of the Renaissance in their fascination with perception, psychology, literature, the natural world, architectural space, musical phrasing, and aesthetic beauty. For many years now, Beavers has made Berlin his home with fellow filmmaker Ute Aurand. We will present seven films he has made since 2007, which continue his exploration of sense of place, reflection, and harmony.

—Susan Oxtoby, Director of Film and Senior Film Curator

Robert Beavers: Program 1
Friday, January 30, 7 PM
Robert Beavers and Susan Oxtoby in Conversation

• Early Monthly Segments (Robert Beavers, Switzerland, Germany, Greece, 1968–70/2002)
• Winged Dialogue (Robert Beavers, Greece, 1967/2000)
• Plan of Brussels (Robert Beavers, Belgium, 1968/2000)
• The Count of Days (Robert Beavers, Switzerland, 1969/2001)

Robert Beavers: Program 2
Saturday, January 31, 2 PM
Robert Beavers and Susan Oxtoby in Conversation

• Palinode (Robert Beavers, Switzerland, 1970/2001)
• Diminished Frame (Robert Beavers, Germany, 1970/2001)
• Still Light (Robert Beavers, Greece, 1970/2001)

Robert Beavers: Program 3
Saturday, January 31, 4:30 PM
Robert Beavers and Christopher Scott in Conversation

• From the Notebook of... (Robert Beavers, Italy, 1971/98)
• The Painting (Robert Beavers, Switzerland, United States, 1972/99)

Robert Beavers: Program 4
Sunday, February 1, 3:30 PM
Robert Beavers and Erik Ulman in Conversation

• Work Done (Robert Beavers, Italy, Switzerland, 1972/99)
• Ruskin (Robert Beavers, Italy, Switzerland, 1975/97)
• AMOR (Robert Beavers, Italy, Austria, 1980)

Robert Beavers: Program 5
Thursday, February 5, 7 PM
Robert Beavers and Ken Ueno in Conversation

• Sotiros (Robert Beavers, Greece, Austria, Switzerland, 1976–78/96)
• Efpsychi (Robert Beavers, Greece, 1983/96)
• Wingseed (Robert Beavers, Greece, 1985)

Mosse Lecture: Robert Beavers
Free admission. Tickets available at the admissions desk beginning at 2:30 PM.
Friday, February 6, 3:30 PM
Robert Beavers and Deniz Göktürk in Conversation

The Berlin-based filmmaker will present Diminished Frame and The Sparrow Dream and discuss the relationship of history, memory, and place in his films.

Robert Beavers: Program 6
Friday, February 6, 7 PM
Robert Beavers and Rebekah Rutkoff in Conversation

• The Hedge Theater (Robert Beavers, Italy, 1986–90/2002)
• The Stoas (Robert Beavers, Greece, 1991–97)
• The Ground (Robert Beavers, Greece, 1993–2001)

Robert Beavers: Program 7
Saturday, February 7, 7 PM
Robert Beavers and Rebekah Rutkoff in Conversation

• Pitcher of Colored Light (Robert Beavers, United States, 2000–07)
• The Suppliant (Robert Beavers, United States, 2010)
• Listening to the Space in My Room (Robert Beavers, United States, 2013)
• Among the Eucalyptuses (Robert Beavers, Greece, 2017)
• “Der Klang, die Welt...” (Robert Beavers, Switzerland, 2018)
• The Sparrow Dream (Robert Beavers, Germany, United States, 2022)
• Dedication: Bernice Hodges (Robert Beavers, United States, 2024)