Robert Beavers (born 1949) is an American experimental filmmaker whose work stands among the most significant in postwar avant-garde cinema. He is best known for My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure, an 18-film cycle spanning decades of work, much of it later re-edited. Beavers developed a distinctive visual language using hand-cut mattes, filters, and precise sound–i...
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In Spring 2013 I was artist in residence at Dartmouth College in New England. This was a vital time for me developing films and projects with artists Toshiya Tsunoda, Christian Wolff and Larry Polanski. I recently discovered a roll I shot during this time - whilst on a visit to the Cape with Robert. The occasion stuck in my memory because of a particularly infection I had caught which made me reticent to travel or do anything. I recall Robert encouraging me to come anyway and to use my Bolex as a way of counter-acting the virus and my general state of malaise.
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A portrait of a recently vacated home, the film evokes both memory and the lingering presence of past inhabitants. Through precise, enigmatic sound–image construction, Beavers crafts an intimate meditation on art, existence, and the search for meaning.
Filmed in Switzerland and released as part of a triptych with A Walk, Zuoz features the filmmaker Robert Beavers skating on ice. Beavers represents another “new beginning” in Aurand’s practice. She recalls seeing his work in the late ‘90s and “enter[ing] a space beyond the images where one is entirely within oneself and simultaneously in the world … where one is simply present and receives the full gift of the film.”
Short video by Tom Chomont, features Robert Beavers and his mother during the filming of Pitcher of Colored Light. Consists of sections titled Bathed in Light, Going For a Ride. Mother Garden, Robert's Mother's Flowers, Time Taken, and Brief Visit.
Filmed when Beavers was 18–19, this self-portrait depicts him and Gregory J. Markopoulos in their Swiss apartment. A diary of domestic life, it transforms everyday objects and intimate details into a charged meditation on love, memory, and desire.
Filmed in Rome in the 1980s, the work draws on Borromini’s Baroque architecture and Il Sassetta’s St. Martin and the Beggar. Beavers contrasts winter’s subdued light with the verdant growth of spring, constructing a precise montage in which image and sound form a poetic dialogue.
Distilled in 1996 from an earlier 50-minute trilogy, this 26-minute film was shot in Greece and Austria and structured around two recurring intertitles, “He said” and “he said.” Each introduces delicate studies of light and place—hotel interiors, cafés, hillsides, storefronts, and street life—framed in parallel variations. The title invokes Apollo as savior and healer.
Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.
Short film shot in Rapallo, 1987.
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