The Cinematheque

“Forgoes the geometric severity characteristic of works like his masterly ars poetic From the Notebook of… without any loss of precision, and generates a subsumed aura of rapture nearly as potent as his sublime city/​nature diptych The Stoas.”

Nathan Lee, Village Voice, on Pitcher of Colored Light

Robert Beavers’s most recent work shows further transformations in his practice. The films are still devoted to charting intimate specificities of places and phenomena by cutting different proportions of subject, light, time, and movement against one another, but he has moved into a more reflective register. Each film deliberately revisits significant relationships. Pitcher of Colored Light is filmed at his mother’s house; The Suppliant at the apartment of his late friend Jacques Dehornois; ​“Der Klang, die Welt…” captures the Zurich house of his landlady Cécile Staehlin before and after her husband Dieter, a cellist, passed away. The Sparrow Dream is perhaps Beavers’s grandest merging of distant locations and elements: childhood myth (via The Odyssey) and mature narration; smooth golden statues and timeworn hands; his Massachusetts hometown; and his current artistic residence in Berlin with the filmmaker Ute Aurand. Each shot refracts an immense scale of consistent attention.

Pitcher of Colored Light
USA 2000-07
Robert Beavers
23 min. 16mm

The Suppliant
USA 2010
Robert Beavers
5 min. 16mm

“Der Klang, die Welt…”
Switzerland 2018
Robert Beavers
5 min. 16mm

The Sparrow Dream
Germany/​USA 2022
Robert Beavers
29 min. 16mm