About

This session focuses on the early films of the American experimental filmmaker Robert Beavers, looking at two highly stylised but intimate works that speak of the coming-into-being of the film and the filmmaker’s pursuit for a creative, personal vision.

Early Monthly Segments

Made when he was only in his late teens, Early Monthly Segments provides a portrait of the domestic and creative life of Beavers and his companion, filmmaker Gregory J. Markopoulos, in their apartment in Switzerland. Beavers’ own “thinking hand” guides the process and the construction of the film that we are watching. As James Macgillivray writes: “His camera is an intimately handled thing … the camera and the editing table become the locus for a reconciliation of the hand and the eye.” The filmmaker finds dynamic, creative tropes and lustres in rooms. This includes the “room” (the “camera”) of his cinematographic apparatus, generating productive energies between what is filming and what is being filmed.

15 minutes | Ages 15+

From the Notebook Of...

First completed in 1971 at age 22 (and re-edited into its current form in the 1990s), From the Notebook Of … is one of Beavers’ major and most celebrated early works. Based upon the notebooks of Leonardo and Paul Valéry’s essay “Introduction to the Method of Leonardo Da Vinci,” it is a rhythmical meditation on the creative life of the filmmaker, drawing upon his own handiwork (his handwritten notes, his matte box). Shot in Florence, it finds suggestive resonances between Leonardo’s artistic fascinations and patterns (such as his ideas about geometry, shape, and motion) and the filmmaker’s own acts of seeing, hearing, and creation. With its brisk pans, tilts, and cuts, Beavers creates a mature architectonic work that still yet feels in labour—still being consummated and realised before us.

As composer Erik Ulman says, the film “exults in something that will remain at the heart of his endeavours: the technical properties of film, camera, sound recorder themselves,” by which Beavers creates “a work racing just before the grasp of the eye and the mind.”

48 minutes | Ages 15+