Movies: Robert Beavers

Filmmaker Jonas Mekas films 160 underground film people over four decades....

Cutting and sewing as metaphors. Central to this work is the complex emotions surrounding love, separation, and the metonymic twinning of objects, including that of edited images and saturated sound. “AMOR is an exquisite lyric, shot in Rome and at ...

"From the Notebook of..." was shot in Florence and takes as its point of departure Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks and Paul Valéry's essay on da Vinci's process. These two elements suggest an implicit comparison between the treatment of space in Renais...

What lives in the space between the stones, in the space cupped between my hand and my chest? Filmmaker/stonemason. A tower or ruin of remembrance. With each swing of the hammer I cut into the image and the sound rises from the chisel. A rhythm, mark...

Beavers shot The Hedge Theatre in Rome in the 1980s. It is an intimate film inspired by the Baroque architecture and stone carvings of Francesco Borromini and St. Martin and the Beggar, a painting by the Sienese painter Il Sassetta. Beavers’ montage ...

“Ruskin visits the sites of (art critic) John Ruskin’s work: London, the Alps and, above all, Venice, where the camera’s attention to masonry and the interaction of architecture and water mimics the author’s descriptive analysis of the ‘stones’ of t...

“The details of the young actor’s face – his eyes, eyebrows, earlobe, chin, etc. – are set opposite the old buildings in the market quarter of Athens, where every street is named after a classic ancient Greek playwrite. In this setting of intense sti...

”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 hand stitching of a massive tome or the frying of a local delicacy, Beavers considers hu...

Beavers distilled the 26-minute Sotiros in 1996 from an original 50-minute trilogy. Filmed in Athens and Peloponnesus in Greece as well as in Austria, much of Sotiros is structured around another binarism: two repeating intertitles marked "He said" a...

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 a...

"Winged Dialogue details with growing clarity the desperate beauty and sexuality of the body animated by its soul, essence blindly reaching out, touching, in brilliant patterns through and beyond those of the vanishing images, expressed vividly in th...

“The title refers to the colonnades that led to the shady groves of the ancient Lyceum, here remembered in shots of industrial arcades, bathed in golden morning light, as quietly empty of human figures as Atget’s survey photos. The rest of the film p...

“I walked into Bernice Hodges’s garden when I was seven years old and asked her to read to me. She was in her mid-seventies. Out of this came an important friendship. In 1966, I tried to film her—it was perhaps the second time that I had put a roll o...

Shedding all traces of narrative in Plan of Brussels, Beavers filmed himself in a hotel room, both at his work desk and lying naked on the bed, while in rapid rhythmic cutting, and sometime in superimposition, the phantasmagoria of people he met in B...

Filmed in Switzerland and released as part of a triptych with A Walk, Zuoz features the filmmaker Robert Beavers skating on ice. Beavers represents another “new beginning” in Aurand’s practice. She recalls seeing his work in the late ‘90s and “enter[...

The view from a window overlooking a busy city street overlays varying geometric shapes moving against a brightly coloured background. Silence is punctuated only by street sounds. Camera original destroyed by Beavers....

The story of Jacob wrestling the angel at the stream called Jabbok....

Ostensibly a portrait of a place where the artist had resided until recently, the new film by Robert Beavers conjures not only the memory but also the physical presence of those who have previously stayed there. Adhering to a solitary intimacy while ...

Beavers’ starting point for this film was a question about how the places where he has lived influences how he sees. Beavers return to one or two locations in Berlin that he had filmed for Diminished Frame in 1970....

“Call them spontaneous or occasional films. I did not know if I would show this publicly when I filmed. The gift was Luke Fowler suggesting that I film his and Corin’s first child, Liath, while I visited them in Glasgow. The images are left in the or...