AFW + NFSA #72: Three Films by Robert Beavers

7:30pm Tuesday 30 September 2025 
The Brunswick Green, 313/315 Sydney Road, Brunswick. 
16mm projection.
$10 on the door.  

In ‘Introduction to the Work of Robert Beavers’ Jonas Mekas writes,

”...Gregory Markopoulos has describes Beavers’s film language most accurately, I think, when he called it ‘the language of diamonds’ in a recent essay in Film Culture Magazine. Robert Beavers’s film language is curiously close to the crystalline qualities of stones and minerals - in shapes, in tones, in feeling, in quality. Beavers’s film language is a unique merging of the actual, living reality, with the abstract, geometric realities, and the Light.”

Beavers is an American filmmaker, born in Massachusetts in 1949. He made his first film in New York in 1966, and then in 1967 left for Europe with his partner, Gregory Markopolous. Over the next decades he made films and lived in Greece, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy. In the 1980’s, Beavers worked with Markopolous to establish The Temenos, a film screening site in Lyssarea Greece. And more recently, the Temenos Archive, based in Switzerland which houses a collection of publications, journals, papers and films and camera originals of the two filmmakers. 

In the early 1990’s, Beavers began a project of re-editing all his films into an 18 film cycle called My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure. Each of the films showing at this event were re-edited into this cycle, however the prints AFW will screen, from the NFSA collection, are the original versions of these films.

Screens with AFW member Lucinda Eva-May’s 'Go [ / So we may see [' (2025).

FILMS

Go [/ So we may see [
2025, 5 mins.
Inspired by, and taking its title from the poem fragments of the ancient greek poet Sappho, ‘Go [ /So we may see [‘ is a short film exploring absence and memory. Composed of shots of the ocean and architecture at a small church on the island of Sifnos, each image is separated by sections of black film. In Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho square brackets represent missing or destroyed pieces of parchment. Likewise sections of black film stand in for the gaps in our vision, what’s forgotten, and what’s lost to passing time.  What do we long for in the absence of the image?

The Count of Days
1969, 43 mins.

“The film is seen as though upon and through the structure of its spiritual partitions. One might say that there are three elements or levels to the images: narrative, descriptive or analytic, and abstract. The Count of Days is not an account so much as an accounting of the essence of the days in which three separate persons are related at points … a penetration through the masks and habits of these days to reveal the nature of the charade and the arena in which it is enacted.”
(Tom Chomont, Film Culture)

Diminished Frame
1970, 30 mins.

“There is a balance in Diminished Frame between a sense of the past seen in the views of West Berlin, filmed in black& white and a sense of the present in which I filmed myself showing how the colour is being created by placing filters in the camera’s aperture. It is the space of the city and of the filmmaker. I search for signs of war’s aftermath and a few moments of daily life.”
(Robert Beavers).

AMOR
1980, 15 mins.

“AMOR is an exquisite lyric, shot in Rome and at the natural theatre of Salzburg. The recurring sounds of cutting cloth, hands clapping, hammering, and tapping underline the associations of the montage of short camera movements, which bring together the making of a suit, the restoration of a building, and details of a figure, presumably Beavers himself, standing in the natural theatre in a new suit, making a series of hand movements and gestures. A handsomely designed Italian banknote suggests the aesthetic economy of the film: the tailoring, trimming, and chiseling point to the editing of the film itself.”
(P. Adams Sitney, Film Comment)