Robert Beavers

Robert Beavers (born 1949 in Brookline, Massachusetts) is an American experimental filmmaker. He attended Deerfield Academy which he left before graduating to move to New York in 1965 to pursue filmmaking. He lived in New York until 1967 when he and his partner, Gregory Markopoulos, left the United States for Europe, where they continued to live and make films until Markopoulos' death in 1992.

Both filmmakers restricted the screenings of their films after leaving America, and instead held yearly screenings of Markopoulos' and Beavers' work from 1980-1986 at the Temenos, a site near Lyssaraia in Arcadia, Greece. After Markopoulos' death, Beavers founded Temenos, Inc., a non-profit devoted to the preservation of Markopoulos' and Beavers' work. Beavers has worked extensively on re-editing his films to create the larger film cycle My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure.

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.

Nationality: 

United States

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