The Cinematheque

“Early Monthly Segments [holds] the key to Beavers’s astounding achievement … Impeccably structural, his art is nonetheless suffused with a romantic passion that includes the man, the camera, and the world’s unending beauties—natural, built, and artistic.”

Roberta Smith, The New York Times

In the autumn of 1965, a teenaged Robert Beavers wrote to Gregory Markopoulos: ​“I am interested in your opinion of what a ​‘filmmaker’s education’ should consist of.” Markopoulos’s reply, one unenamoured with the New York institutional landscape, included a question (“Should he leave the country or remain?”) and a promise that this vocation would require something he had also yet to find: ​“a haven” apart from influences where, as the writer Nikos Kazantzakis put it, one might ​“open a road that may entice the future and force it to make up its mind.” The two artists left for Europe together, and Early Monthly Segments would become the evidence of this new direction. Beavers’s editing captures the bold, playful energy of someone essaying an entire catalogue of available colours, camera movements, and poses to frame both Markopoulos and himself. This pursuit of male and pastoral beauty is differently patterned in Still Light and Wingseed.

Early Monthly Segments
Greece/​Germany/​Switzerland 1968–70, 2002
Robert Beavers
33 min. 16mm

Still Light
Greece/​United Kingdom 1970, 2001
Robert Beavers
25 min. 16mm

Wingseed
Greece 1985
Robert Beavers
15 min. 35mm

“A filmmaker in absolute command … Still Light paves the way, league after league, towards a language I would like to call a language of diamonds.”

Gregory Markopoulos