Robert Beavers

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.

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 community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.

“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 film in the Bolex camera, and I was very nervous; part of the time I inadvertently left the lens cap on while filming. I was so disappointed that I threw the footage away except for two short film strips. Decades later, during the making of The Sparrow Dream, I re-filmed these two film strips on my editing table and objects associated with her, such as a wooden tray that she had carved. She was the first person to explain to me what an artist might be and in teaching me how to carve wood, I learned how to go with the grain or against it”

Shot in Florence, the film draws on Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks and Paul Valéry’s essay on da Vinci’s creative process to explore parallels between Renaissance space and the moving image. Beavers employs rapid pans and tilts along the city’s facades, interspersed with glimpses of his own face, linking camera movement to the filmmaker’s investigative gaze. The work marks a turning point in his practice, foregrounding presence and perception as central to his method. (Note: The film was re-edited and re-released in 1999.)

Filmed when Beavers was 18–19, this self-portrait depicts him and Gregory J. Markopoulos in their Swiss apartment. A diary of domestic life, it transforms everyday objects and intimate details into a charged meditation on love, memory, and desire.

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-century painting and a quiet sense of spiritual immanence.

“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 stillness, sometimes interrupted by sudden sounds and movements in the streets, he speaks a single word, “teleftea”, meaning the last (one), and as he repeats this word, it moves differently each time across his face and gains another sense from one scene to the next, suggesting the uncanny proximity of eroticism, the sacred and chance.” (Robert Beavers)

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 also a motor cycle and film equipment. In succeeding scenes he appears to try on identities offered by institutional doctrines of religion and social traditions of (overt) masculinity. Much of the film was constructed in-camera with a small amount of editing afterwards. An innovation was the use of in-camera fade-outs as phrase markers, not as terminal points, within a single set-up or shot.

Filmed in Rome in the 1980s, the work draws on Borromini’s Baroque architecture and Il Sassetta’s St. Martin and the Beggar. Beavers contrasts winter’s subdued light with the verdant growth of spring, constructing a precise montage in which image and sound form a poetic dialogue.

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 youth and age, creation and critique, image and text.

Distilled in 1996 from an earlier 50-minute trilogy, this 26-minute film was shot in Greece and Austria and structured around two recurring intertitles, “He said” and “he said.” Each introduces delicate studies of light and place—hotel interiors, cafés, hillsides, storefronts, and street life—framed in parallel variations. The title invokes Apollo as savior and healer.

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-portrait and recurring shots of a shattered windowpane.

An early exploration of intimacy and perception, the film portrays the body’s beauty and sexuality as animated by the soul. Through dissolving and vanishing images, Beavers creates a sensuous interplay of touch, memory, and after-image, leaving an imprint on both eye and mind.

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 the persistence of personal landscapes.

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, allowing vision beyond sight.

A meditation on landscape and desire, the film juxtaposes arid terrain, wild grasses, and herds of goats with the naked figure of a torso in shifting light. Shepherd’s calls, flute phrases, and the rhythm of bells echo Beavers’ quick, side-to-side camera movements, building to a vibrant visual and sonic ostinato.

“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 filming, and the editing is only a few excisions.” (RB)

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 Martinů’s Arabesque. Beavers punctuates their playing with luminous passages of white light, shaping an intimate portrait of friendship, loss, and the transcendent reach of music.

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.”

Shot in Rome and Salzburg’s natural theatre, the film uses cutting and sewing as metaphors for love, separation, and the craft of montage. Cloth being trimmed, hands clapping, and tools striking accompany images of tailoring, architectural restoration, and Beavers himself in a new suit, linking gesture and sound to the editing process.