About

This selection of the recent films of Robert Beavers explores the “bodily sense” that they exert and awaken. As Haden Guest has noted, these films mark “an important departure, a decisive shift” in the filmmaker’s work, as he nurtures a form of poetic documentary and “a new intimacy of subject and scale.”

“A continuity develops for the filmmaker between the physical structure of the medium and each action involved in the filming, whether simple or complex and this bodily sense is extended in other ways during the editing”--Robert Beavers

Pitcher of Colored Light 2007

Filmed in his mother’s house and gardens in Falmouth, Massachusetts, Pitcher of Colored Light is an act of “homecoming” and an intimate study of the luminous and the obscure, of stillness and movement. Through its attention to (and play with) light and shadow, it studies the life of objects, of personal effects, and of space—their “vital instability,” in Beavers’ words. He writes that the “special quality” of the shadow is that it “opens a passage to the subjective”: “The walls are screens through which I pass to the inhabited privacy.”

Beavers has considered his editing as a rhythmical, embodied movement—a “pendulum” that “swings between my sense of self and of these other human beings; it also swings between my rooms on the ground floor and the floors above me and the space outside.”

In Pitcher of Colored Light, the filmmaker’s own presence interplays with the scene he investigates, becoming part of its acoustic and visual space and informing a “sense of place …never separate from the moment.

24 minutes | Ages 15+

The Suppliant 2010

Filmed in Brooklyn Heights in 2003, while staying in the apartment of his friend Jacques Dehornois, The Suppliant takes as its central motif a small bronze statue with arms outstretched. Its study of light and colour and of the New York cityscape is matched by sounds of sketching on paper—correlating film and notebook, as in From the Notebook Of… Beavers returned to edit and complete the film after working on Pitcher of Colored Light, thinking about his friend Dehernois who had recently passed away.

5 minutes | Ages 15+

Among the Eucalyptuses 2017

Filmed around the year 2000 in Nafplion in the Peloponnese, a port city located between Athens and Lyssarea (the site of Beavers’ ongoing Temenos screenings). Beavers writes: “Late afternoon quiet and a silent figure seated on a bench in Nafplion; the historic figures of Kolokotronis and Kapodistrias; plus the old factories and machinery, warehouses and train lines that are part of a Piraeus, now disappearing.

4 minutes | Ages 15+

"Der Klang, die Welt..." 2018

The film returns to the site of one of Beavers’ earlier films, Listening to the Space in My Room 2013—the home of Cécile and Dieter Staehelin in Zumikon, Switzerland. Dieter, now deceased, is heard on the soundtrack while Cécile is heard playing an Arabesque by Bohuslav Martinů. Beavers conceived the film as a “gift” to Cécile: “She had once stated a wish for her life to end like the last notes of this music."

5 minutes | Ages 15+

The Sparrow Dream 2022

Another act of return and homecoming, Beavers’ latest film revisits the effects of his filmmaking life: locations (such as his mother’s house in Massachusetts, seen in Pitcher of Colored Light 2007) and objects (including the bronze statue from The Suppliant 2010, rediscovered in Wedding, Germany) reappear. Filmed primarily between Berlin, Beavers’ current place of residence, and Massachusetts, his childhood home, the filmmaker concentrates “on particular domestic gestures and some locations connected to [his] childhood.” On the film, he writes:

“The turning pages of a version of the Odyssey and the sight of a Korean War monument in my hometown, Weymouth, suggested different sides of the same subject: Nostos or homecoming. The vision of Greece that was first awakened in my childhood remains a source. Despite different histories, one culture reflects another, and I asked the question:

‘Why have I returned to film these places, which I left so many years ago?’

‘For the deep view it gives now.’”

The Sparrow Dream also prominently features the filmmaker Ute Aurand, who we see in domestic, creative, intimate moments of work and leisure. The direct register of Beavers’ voice on the soundtrack speaks of memory and of the living present—of a mythic renewal, a collapsing of time. “Fatherland, motherland, birthplace,” he says. “In one place, speaking of another. In one time, speaking of another.”

29 minutes | Ages 15+