Robert Beavers

Dedication: Bernice Hodges (2024)

"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 of fi ...

The Sparrow Dream (2022)

Beavers revisits locations in Berlin first filmed in Diminished Frame (1970), alongside sites in Massachusetts, to reflect on how lived places shape vision and memory. Moving between past and present, the film becomes a meditation on perception, time, and ...

“Der Klang, die Welt…” (2018)

Conceived as a gift for Cécile Staehelin after the death of her husband Dieter, the film reflects on music as both memory and philosophy. Dieter speaks about sound as harmony, proportion, and inner life, while he and Cécile are seen performing Bohuslav M ...

Among the Eucalyptuses (2017)

Late afternoon quiet and a silent figure seated on a bench in Nafplion; the historic figures of Kolokotronis and Kapodistrias; plus the old factories and machinery, warehouses and train lines that are part of a Piraeus, now disappearing. ...

Shared Table (2016)

Last August, several filmmakers joined me to repair the splices in Markopoulos's Eniaios. I interrupted our work for a moment; the generosity of James, Silvia, Nina, Alexandre and Julia prompted me to film them. Then I filmed James Edmonds a second time wi ...

First Weeks (2014)

"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 order of ...

Listening to the Space in My Room (2013)

A portrait of a recently vacated home, the film evokes both memory and the lingering presence of past inhabitants. Through precise, enigmatic sound–image construction, Beavers crafts an intimate meditation on art, existence, and the search for meaning. ...

The Suppliant (2010)

Filmed in 2003 while staying in a Brooklyn Heights apartment, the work centers on a small Greek statue revealed in shifting morning and afternoon light. Beavers weaves these images with views of the East River and Manhattan Bridge, later completing the fil ...

Pitcher of Colored Light (2007)

Filmed in his mother's house and garden, Beavers traces shifting shadows across seasons, capturing a blend of solitude and peace. Light and shadow become passages to memory, as the film transforms walls and spaces into reflections of place, time, and inner ...

Early Monthly Segments (2003)

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 com ...

The Hedge Theater (2002)

Some years after filming AMOR, I returned to Italy and found the source for a new film in the architecture of Borromini and in a grove of trees with empty birdcages. (A grove of trees, a rocolo, in which hunters would set out cages with decoys, called rich ...

The Ground (2001)

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, marked by ...

Sotiros (2000)

In Sotiros, there is an unspoken dialogue and a seen dialogue, The latter is held between the intertitles and the images; the former is moved by the tripod and by the emotions of the filmmaker. Both dialogues are interwoven with the sunlight's movement as ...

The Stoas (1997)

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 presents ...

Wingseed (1985)

This magnificent landscape, both hot and dry, is far from sterile; rather, the heat and dryness produce a distinct type of life, seen in the perfect forms of the wild grass and seed pods, the herds of goats as well as in the naked figure. The torso, in its ...

Efpsychi (1983)

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 stilln ...

AMOR (1980)

AMOR is an exquisite lyric, shot in Rome and at the natural theatre of Salzburg. The recurring sounds of cutting cloth, hands clapping, hammering, and tapping underline the associations of the montage of short camera movements, which bring together the mak ...

Sotiros (Alone) (1978)

The second film in Robert Beavers' Sotiros trilogy ...

Sotiros in the Elements (1978)

The final entry in Robert Beavers' Sotiros trilogy ...

Sotiros Responds (1977)

The first film in Robert Beavers' Sotiros trilogy ...

Ruskin (1974)

Ruskin visits the sites of 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 the city. The sound of ...

Work Done (1973)

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 handstiching of a massive tome or the frying of a local delicacy, Beavers considers human activ ...

From the Notebook of... (1972)

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 Renaissance ...

The Painting (1972)

The Painting intercuts shots of traffic navigating the old-world remnants of downtown Bern, Switzerland, with details from a 15th-century altarpiece, "The Martyrdom of St. Hippolytus". The painting shows the calm, near-naked saint in a peaceful landscape, ...

Still Light (1971)

The first half of the film explores delicate nuances of lighting, colour and depth as Beavers shoots the face of a young man in various locales on the Greek island of Hydra, using a variety of customized masks and filters. The man's face remains constant t ...

Diminished Frame (1971)

There is a balance in Diminished Frame between a sense of the past seen in the views of West Berlin, filmed in black& white and a sense of the present in which I filmed myself showing how the colour is being created by placing filters in the camera's apert ...

Palinode (1970)

In Palinode a disk-shaped matte continually shifting in and out of focus alternately blocks part of the image or contains it. Its respiratory rhythm matches operatic fragments of Wladimir Vogel's Wagadu, as the camera studies a middle-aged male singer in Z ...

The Count of Days (1969)

The film is seen as though upon and through the structure of its spiritual partitions. One might say that there are three elements or levels to the images: narrative, descriptive or analytic, and abstract. The Count of Days is not an account so much as an ...

View (1969)

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. ...

Plan of Brussels (1968)

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 Brussel ...

Winged Dialogue (1967)

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 the after ...

Spiracle (1967)

Portrait studies of Mrs. Hodges, Gail Beavers (the filmmaker's sister) and Gregory J. Markopoulos. ...

On the Everyday Use of the Eyes of Death (1966)

Filmed in Italy (Rome), on Agfa-Gaevert reversal film. Beavers destroyed the camera original. ...

Dedication: Bernice Hodges (2024)

"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 of fi ...

A Visit With Robert (2024)

In Spring 2013 I was artist in residence at Dartmouth College in New England. This was a vital time for me developing films and projects with artists Toshiya Tsunoda, Christian Wolff and Larry Polanski. I recently discovered a roll I shot during this time ...

Cape Cod (2018)

Listening to the Space in My Room (2013)

A portrait of a recently vacated home, the film evokes both memory and the lingering presence of past inhabitants. Through precise, enigmatic sound–image construction, Beavers crafts an intimate meditation on art, existence, and the search for meaning. ...

Zuoz (2008)

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[ing] a ...

Early Monthly Segments (2003)

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 com ...

The Hedge Theater (2002)

Some years after filming AMOR, I returned to Italy and found the source for a new film in the architecture of Borromini and in a grove of trees with empty birdcages. (A grove of trees, a rocolo, in which hunters would set out cages with decoys, called rich ...

The Ground (2001)

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, marked by ...

Sotiros (2000)

In Sotiros, there is an unspoken dialogue and a seen dialogue, The latter is held between the intertitles and the images; the former is moved by the tripod and by the emotions of the filmmaker. Both dialogues are interwoven with the sunlight's movement as ...

Laboratorium Anthology (1999)

Scenes from the life and work at Anthology Film Archives. Much of the footage in this video was shot by Auguste Varkalis. ...

Birth of a Nation (1997)

Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own "nation of cinema," a vital ...

From the Notebook of... (1972)

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 Renaissance ...

Still Light (1971)

The first half of the film explores delicate nuances of lighting, colour and depth as Beavers shoots the face of a young man in various locales on the Greek island of Hydra, using a variety of customized masks and filters. The man's face remains constant t ...

Plan of Brussels (1968)

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 Brussel ...

Winged Dialogue (1967)

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 the after ...

Eros, O Basileus (1967)

Structured in nine tableaux each a study of a simple action or situation involving a lone, naked figure, the blind Eros, searching for fulfilment, for self. The objects he touches - books, paintings - can be seen as icons of the creative spirit; there is a ...

The Mirror Garden (1967)

A romantic and lyric study of a young friend and readings he encouraged, especially Mallarmé. ...

Jabbok (1967)

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

Jabbok (1967)

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