The Cinematheque

“A masterpiece … Elegant, beautiful, complex, and austere … A film about the transformation of life into art and the loveliness of Florentine sunlight flooding through a window.”

Manohla Dargis, The New York Times, on From the Notebook of…

Where Early Monthly Segments is a cascading mixture of techniques, Robert Beavers’s From the Notebook of… is an exactly measured, separated, and classified system. In a Florentine apartment, Beavers trains the piercing concentration of his 16mm camera on the basic ingredients of a solitary day—the self, the pen, the empty page, and an open window—to which he adds, as if in a laboratory’s controlled environment, sequenced images, sounds, and camera movements. Not least of these is the whipping vertical motion of his camera’s turret turn, which accompanies the passage of flying birds, the descent of his pen, the formal posture of Beavers himself, and the angled view of the apartment, suspended above the street scenes below. The approach, at once a form of study and demonstration, treats time and presence in a manner both nakedly unadorned and complexly elaborated. In AMOR, Beavers stitches fabric and forking garden paths together via a forceful, enigmatic figuration.

From the Notebook of…
Italy 1971, 1998
Robert Beavers
48 min. 35mm

AMOR
Italy/​Austria 1980
Robert Beavers
15 min. 16mm

“Gloriously shot and edited … Perhaps Robert Beavers’s most masterful work of structural harmony, binary oppositions, and self-reflexive form.”

Susan Oxtoby, TIFF 2000, on From the Notebook of...