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 space beyond the images where one is entirely within oneself and simultaneously in the world … where one is simply present and receives the full gift of the film.”
Short video by Tom Chomont, features Robert Beavers and his mother during the filming of Pitcher of Colored Light. Consists of sections titled Bathed in Light, Going For a Ride. Mother Garden, Robert's Mother's Flowers, Time Taken, and Brief Visit.
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 companion Gregory J. Markopoulos in their Swiss apartment. The film functions as a diary, capturing aspects of home life with precise attention to detail, documenting the familiar with great love and transforming objects and ordinary personal effects into a highly charged work of homoeroticism. (Susan Oxtoby, Toronto International Film Festival).
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 contrasts the sensuous softness of winter light with the lush green growth brought by spring rains. Each shot and each source of sound is steeped in meaning and placed within the film’s structure with exacting skill to build a poetic relationship between image and sound.
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" and "he said." Each title introduces a set of visual phrases with loosely parallel camerawork. The images are careful and delicate studies of light patterns in a hotel suite and at a cafe, rolling hills populated by a lone shepherd, Eurostyle modernized storefronts, a blind man begging in the street. The film’s title refers to one of the appellations of the Apollo, in his role as savior or healer. - New York Press
Filmmaker Jonas Mekas films 160 underground film people over four decades.
Short film shot in Rapallo, 1987.
Robert Beavers is an American experimental filmmaker best known for My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure, an epic cycle comprising 18 of his films (many later re-edited) made since 1967. Beavers’s use of shaped mattes to obscure aspects of the image and gelatine filters that produce varieties of coloured light are hallmarks of some of his films, many of which observe hand- and craftwork (including his own filmmaking). Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, Beavers attended Deerfield Academy before meeting the filmmaker Gregory J. Markopoulos in 1966. They moved to Europe in 1967 and removed their films from distribution; Beavers did not show his films in the United States again until 1996. Beavers made films in Greece, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy. His early Plan of Brussels and Winged Dialogue (1967-68/2000) are multilayered psychic explorations; From the Notebook of…(1971/1998) is set in Florence and inspired by Leonardo’s notebooks. Ruskin (1975/1997) is shot at the various sites of the titular artist/critic’s work in London, the Alps and Venice. Beavers’s only film to use intertitles, the dialogic Sotiros (1976-78/1996) marks the end of his use of filters and mattes. Wingseed(1985), The Hedge Theater (1986-90/2002), The Stoas (1991-97), and The Ground (1993-2001) dwell in pastoral environments in Italy and Greece. Beavers has produced three films outside the Hand Outstretched cycle: Pitcher of Colored Light (2007), The Suppliant (2012) (both shot in the U.S.) and Listening to the Space in My Room (2013). He lives with the German filmmaker Ute Aurand in Berlin and in Massachusetts.
By browsing this website, you accept our cookies policy.