Robert Beavers (1949, Brookline, Massachusetts) is one of the most influential avant-garde filmmakers of the second half of the 20th century. Although born and raised in the United States, he has been living and making films in Europe since 1967. His 16mm films, at the same time lyrical and rigorous, sensuous and complex, are inhabited by the landscapes, the architecture and the cultural traditions of the Mediterranean and Alpine cities and countryside where they are filmed, and yet reveal deeper personal and aesthetic themes. As he acknowledges himself, he strives “for the projected film image to have the same force of awakening sight as any other great image.” He regards filming as part of a complex procedure, which begins in the eyes of the filmmaker and is shaped by his gestures in relation to the camera. Beavers’s attention to the physicality of the film medium is evident also in the editing, a fully manual process that leads to a unique form of phrasing. Harry Tomicek calls it a form of “cinematic breathing”: “an exchange of speech and silence, emergence and concealment. Robert Beavers might be the only filmmaker in the world whose works announce the mystery of this process.” Until the late 1990s his films were very rarely shown, but recent retrospectives at the Tate Modern London, the Whitney Museum in New York, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley and the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna have finally brought to his work the attention it deserves. Courtisane and Cinematek will join forces to present his oeuvre in Ghent and Brussels, a city Beavers has a strong attachment to but where his work hasn’t been screened in several decades. Brussels was not only the first European city where he settled together with his partner filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos (1928-1992) after leaving the United States but also where his film culture and cinephilia developed, thanks to Jacques Ledoux, the then curator of the Royal Belgian Film Archive. Ledoux also encouraged Beavers to continue making films, and is one of the protagonists of Plan of Brussels (1968). From his Early Monthly Segments to his most recent work The Suppliant (2010), this selective retrospective in Brussels and Ghent covers more than 40 years of work and represents for Beavers an occasion to return to the scene of his beginnings as a filmmaker, the Brussels Cinémathèque. On the last day of the festival, April 3, Robert Beavers will present a selection of films of his own as well as by other filmmakers in Ghent. The following week, four more screening programmes will follow in Cinematek, the film theatre of the Belgian Royal Film Archive.

With the support of SWISS FILMS

15:00 ROBERT BEAVERS FILMS PART 1

Ruskin
1975/1997, 35mm, b/w & colour, sound, 45’
Filmed in Italy (Venice), Switzerland (the Grisons) and England (London)

“Ruskin visits the sites of (art critic) John Ruskin’s work: London, the Alps and, above all, Venice, where the camera’s attention to masonry and the interaction of architecture and water mimics the author’s descriptive analysis of the ‘stones’ of the city. The sound of pages turning and the image of a book, Ruskin’s Unto This Last, forcibly reminds us that a poet’s perceptions and in this case his political economy, are preserved and reawakened through acts of reading and writing”. (P. Adams Sitney)

The Suppliant
2010, 16mm, colour, sound, 5’ Filmed in USA (New York)

”My filming for The Suppliant was done in February 2003, while a guest in the Brooklyn Heights apartment of Jacques Dehornois. When I recollect the impulse for this filming, I remember my desire to show a spiritual quality united to the sensual in my view of this small Greek statue. I chose to reveal the figure solely through its blue early morning highlights and in the orange sunlight of late afternoon. After filming the statue, I walked down to the East River and continued to film near the Manhattan Bridge and the electrical works; then I returned to the apartment and filmed a few other details. I set this film material aside, while continuing to film and edit Pitcher of Colored Light, later I took it up twice to edit but could not find my way. Most of the editing was finally done in 2009 then I waited to see whether it was finished and found that it was not. In May 2010, I made several editing changes and created the sound track with thoughts of this friend’s recent death.” (RB)

Pitcher of Colored Light
2007, 16mm, colour, sound, 23’ Filmed in USA (Falmouth, Massachusetts)

“…The shadows play an essential part in the mixture of loneliness and peace that exists here. The seasons move from the garden into the house, projecting rich diagonals in the early morning or late afternoon. Each shadow is a subtle balance of stillness and movement; it shows the vital instability of space. Its special quality opens a passage to the subjective; a voice within the film speaks to memory. The walls are screens through which I pass to the inhabited privacy. We experience a place through the perspective of where we come from and hear another’s voice through our own acoustic. The sense of place is never separate from the moment.” (RB)

16:45 CARTE BLANCHE TO ROBERT BEAVERS

Bagatelle for Willard Maas
Marie Menken, US, 1958/1961, 16mm, colour, silent, 5’30”

India
Ute Aurand, DE, 2005, 16mm, colour, sound, 57’

“The first time that I viewed a film program by Marie Menken, I dismissed it; the same happened with my first viewing of a film by Ute Aurand. These filmmakers were opposite poles to my own way of filmmaking, and, in selecting this carte-blanche program, I reflect how my experience of their films has changed. Fortunately I had other occasions to see their films. The initial irritation and uncertainty suddenly opened to recognition. To experience discontent can be a sign of growth, a turning point in (my) appreciation of a film, a piece of music or a poem. Filmmakers, like Menken or Aurand, hide themselves in their directness and simplicity. Their use of handheld camera and their awareness of rhythm create a vision that draws its strength from their surroundings, but the vitality of this open embrace contains a genuine shyness or reticence. It was not until I recognized this that I could see how their lyric contains a depth. Marie Menken’s Bagatelle for Willard Maas is a clear example. It possesses the qualities of angularity, rhythmic emphasis, sensitivity to surfaces and other means to express sensuousness, and through her spontaneity, she carries her film from one mood to the next until we reach the conclusion. And she is a collaborator; she allows Teiji Ito’s music an equal place. The film appears to meander, the way that a visitor to Versailles might, but I believe that in the change in moods there are elements of a story, one is the encounter of a gentle sphinx with a wounded slave and the other is the revolution. Using a different metaphor to introduce Ute Aurand’s India, I could say that it is a ‘symphony’, and that her three visits to Pune are its three movements. The basic rhythm is established through her filming short clusters of images, often with camera movements that are like “little side steps,” and sometimes these clusters develop into complex rhythmic variations on the sights that she discovers as she walks, rides or drives through the city. This kaleidoscope of impressions, both of sound and image, is punctuated by pauses in which the filmmaker inserts her own presence through details of a shirt, a coffee cup, a notebook, an earring or other self-reflections in her room. Some images have an animistic power; I remember a cluster of three small leaves at the base of a giant tree. They shiver in the wind to the sound of drums and that precedes a truly ecstatic dance-procession, one of an entire series of dances in the film. Aurand also has the courage to approach children’s faces. She has said, “Even though I am living through what I see, what I want to reach is the invisible. The screen is a doorway; it is like my relation to the children, also a vehicle to the beyond.” Returning once more to her camera’s “side steps”, I have only recently noticed how these movements allow her a beautiful ease and swiftness in transitions. These transitions from one subject to the next are also like music, but a music that incorporates qualities that are less dualistic than our own. We see in these films two filmmakers using the very common opportunity of filming their travel; one is a ‘tourist’ visiting Versailles, the other is in India. But for the spectator who will look carefully, there is a generosity and probity that reaches through the surface pleasure to the embrace of life and mortality.” (RB)

A FEW POINTS BY ROBERT BEAVERS
This text was originally written for the screening of the cycle “My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure” at Tate Modern in 2007 curated by Mark Webber, and it’s reproduced here with the kind permission of its author Robert Beavers and of Mark Webber.

As a filmmaker who has developed a number of themes and filmic forms, I draw upon sources of inspiration that are planted long before they become actual starting points for filming. These sources come from what I see, from my reading or from any number of other impulses in daily life. The entire cycle of “My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure” can be understood in one way as autobiographical, as growing out of my relation to Gregory Markopoulos, protected by solitude and the spirit that came from our dedication to filmmaking. My way of work is a tentative searching, made possible because I hold the actual filmmaking in my hands as cameraman, film editor, sound technician* and sound editor. Beginning with a few notes that I continue to write while the filming progresses, I see my notebook as a place in which to be patient and to sustain the continuity of the work, to consider future steps and remain open to unforeseen additions or deletions. In the filming I hold to the discipline of composing the individual image and communicate directly through the creation of a particular space. I respond to a location or figure by choosing the camera angle and distance. I move the camera less often than I create a movement by turning the lens at the beginning or end of the shot. My interest is to simplify the image and balance movement with stillness. The transitions are made through the turn of the lens or a fade. But none of this should be exaggerated. I think of filmmaking as a form of architecture, the entire process is nourished through many stages of development, and the vision of each part leads to the next. The work does not exclude spontaneity. The filming reaches forward and extends a central impulse. It has a chronology. Observation draws out an interior richness.
The editing is composed through a vision that grows from the beginning to the end. I start by removing two frames from every shot and attach these frames to a piece of white paper and write lists. I edit with a minimum of equipment, looking at these pages of film frames, then selecting a film shot and holding it to the light, and looking at the lists, which help to give me an overview of the entire film material. Because I am not usually viewing and reviewing the moving image on an editing table, I have the freedom to create the film in my mind’s eye, using my memory of the actual filming and the rhythm that already exists in it. I build the phrases of images by looking at these pages of small 16mm film frames. It is a process of active memorizing and then making sudden leaps. Searching for how the images communicate with each other is only one part of it. I am also judging the length as much by the physical measure of the strip of film as by its duration in time. Sometimes I am interested in creating a close knit or solid structure in the final film. I liken this to the experience that I had when briefly studying Latin as a boy. I noted how the words in the sentence that I was translating fitted together like cut stones; this was very different from English. I created a polyphonic rhythm imposed by the editing in my early films; in my later films I have sought to balance camera movements and the movement within the frame with moments of stillness so that the rhythm is not solely marked at the film cut. Reaching the truth in an instant; returning to the instant and in the image reaching the truth: It is a wonder that comes out of the unseen; the projected image shows this. * I record and edit my own sound just as I film and edit the image, but in each case there is someone who contributes to the final result. Christian Beusch assists me in the final sound mix and makes the transfer to 35mm magnetic. Mike Kolvek at Cinema Arts has colour-timed most of my films for printing the projection copies, with the exception of the ones by Simon Lund at Cineric.