Movies: Robert Beavers

“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...

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 ...

“There is a balance 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 created by placing filters in the camera’s aperture. I searc...

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...

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

Filmed on Hydra, the work studies a young man’s face across shifting light and landscape, framed through customized masks and filters. The constant visage, set against iconic surroundings, evokes a Renaissance portrait while reflecting on binaries of...

“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 ...

Beavers intercuts scenes of traffic in Bern with details from the 15th-century altarpiece The Martyrdom of St. Hippolytus. In its revised form, the film gains a psychodramatic intensity, juxtaposing Markopoulos in shafts of light with a torn self-por...

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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....

Shot in Florence and the Alps, the film contemplates traditional European labor—ice vaults, bookbinding, cooking—while largely omitting human protagonists. Through textural equivalences between workshop and field, book and forest, stone and mountain,...

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 singe...

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

Named for the colonnades of the ancient Lyceum, the film juxtaposes industrial arcades in golden morning light with lush images of streams and wooded glens. Empty of human figures yet rich in presence, Beavers composes landscapes that evoke both 19th...

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 t...

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

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[...

“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...

Interweaving stonework and filmmaking, Beavers evokes memory through hammer strokes and chisel sounds that shape both image and rhythm. In this dialogue of repetition and variation, the film carves out a space where emptiness itself gains form, allow...

Filmed in a Brussels hotel room, Beavers alternates between his work desk and lying nude on the bed, while rapid cuts and superimpositions conjure a rush of street scenes and fleeting encounters. The film abandons narrative for a psychic montage of m...