This career retrospective, combined with a filmmaker residency, offers Bay Area audiences a chance to see American avant-garde filmmaker Robert Beavers’s highly rewarding body of work and engage with him as an artist. His films are exceptional for their visual beauty, aural texture, and depth of emotional expression. They embody the ideals of the Renaissance in their fascination with perception, psychology, literature, the natural world, architectural space, musical phrasing, and aesthetic beauty.
Born in 1949 in Brookline, Massachusetts, Beavers began to make films in the mid-1960s in New York City. By the end of that decade, he had relocated to Europe. The majority of Beavers’s films were shot in the 1970s and 1980s in Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and Greece. Between 1994 and 2002, the artist involved himself in reediting the images and creating new soundtracks for his eighteen-film cycle, My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure.
See BAMPFA for more details and to purchase tickets.
Program 1
Friday, January 30 | 7 PM
Robert Beavers and Rebekah Rutkoff in Conversation
Featuring Early Monthly Segments, Winged Dialogue, Plan of Brussels, and The Count of Days. Beavers talks with Rebekah Rutkoff, author of Double Vision: The Cinema of Robert Beavers (2024).
Program 2
Saturday, January 31 | 2 PM
Robert Beavers and Rebekah Rutkoff in Conversation
Featuring Palinode, Diminished Frame, and Still Light
Program 3
Saturday, January 31 | 4:30 PM
Robert Beavers and Christopher Scott (Comparative Literature) in Conversation
Featuring From the Notebook of . . . and The Painting
Program 4
Sunday, February 1 | 3:30 PM
Robert Beavers and Eric Ulman in Conversation
Featuring Work Done, Ruskin, and AMOR
Erik Ulman teaches in the Department of Music at Stanford University
Program 5
Thursday, February 5 | 7 PM
Robert Beavers and Ken Ueno (Music) in Conversation
Featuring Sotiros, Efpsychi, and Wingseed
Mosse Lecture
Friday, February 6 | 3:30 PM
Free admission
In conversation with Deniz Göktürk (German), Beavers discusses his film aesthetic and the relationship of history, memory, and place in his work. The lecture includes the films Diminished Frame and The Sparrow Dream.
