Anthology Film Archives

Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives

THE FILMS OF ROBERT BEAVERS

September 26 – September 29

September 26-29, 2024

While Robert Beavers’s body of work ranks among the most revered in the canon of avant-garde cinema, his films are more often spoken or written about than seen. Opportunities to view them here in the U.S. – especially all together – have come around no more than once in a blue moon, with the only large-scale retrospectives on these shores taking place at the Whitney Museum in 2005 and at various venues in the Bay Area in 2009. On the occasion of the appearance of Rebekah Rutkoff’s invaluable new book, “Double Vision: The Cinema of Robert Beavers” (2024), and in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art (which will host Beavers for a “Modern Mondays” presentation on September 9), Anthology is proud to present the first comprehensive U.S. retrospective of Beavers’s work in 15 years.

Perhaps the most distinctive quality of Beavers’s films is the degree to which they are at once both transcendent and materialist. Few filmmakers have demonstrated such a command of the medium, and Beavers has deployed his technical mastery to film landscapes, bodies, buildings, and spaces with a refined attention to the qualities of light and form that evokes the sublimity of classical painting, sculpture, or poetry. And yet Beavers insistently foregrounds the mechanism through which he produces his images, by employing a repertoire of formal strategies, including using lens shifts as an almost percussive punctuation, introducing filters and mattes to fragment, reframe, or otherwise transform the images, and sometimes even using mirrors to film himself filming.

The association with “classical” culture is one that was made explicit in the first part of Beavers’s career, through the films’ titles (FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF…; RUSKIN; THE STOAS) and their subject matter (the natural and built landscapes of Greece, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland, where Beavers and his then-partner Gregory Markopoulos resided and traveled). The last two decades, however, have brought a shift in his work, with Beavers increasingly turning his camera on the landscapes (and people) of New England, where he was born and raised. This refocusing on the environments that shaped him has gone hand-in-hand with a newfound formal transparency. The camera is still a palpable presence in his films, and Beavers’s extraordinary visual precision and classical approach to light and form remain in full force. But in his late work his formal strategies have become comparatively self-effacing, subordinate both to the reflective emotional textures he’s striving towards and to a thematic preoccupation with the idea of “home”.

We are overjoyed to welcome Robert Beavers to Anthology for a retrospective comprising all of his films, presented in a roughly chronological sequence, and screening entirely on 16mm and 35mm.

For more info about Rebekah Rutkoff’s “Double Vision: The Cinema of Robert Beavers” (2024), click here.

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