From Rebekah Rutkoff’s Double Vision: The Cinema of Robert Beavers, published by MIT Press.
From the Notebook of... (Robert Beavers, 1971/1998). © Robert Beavers, courtesy Temenos Archive.
FIRST CONTACT
In February 1967, eighteen-year-old Robert Beavers took Icelandic Air’s New York to Reykjavík flight, the cheapest route between North America and Europe, and disembarked in Luxembourg City. On a train to Brussels the next morning, a student initiated a brief conversation: he asked Beavers if he believed in God. The young man accidentally left his multicolored scarf behind, and Beavers kept it for many years: a memento of a disarming exchange with a stranger in a foreign place. The memory of first contact with Europe was sealed by color.
In Brussels, Beavers submitted a film precis to Jacques Ledoux, the Belgian Royal Film Archive curator, for a competition connected to the upcoming edition of the Knokke-le-Zoute experimental film festival (also called ExPRMNTL), the sporadic international event founded in 1949 by Ledoux and held at a Flemish seaside casino between Christmas and New Year’s.1 Agfa-Gevaert, the Belgian-German celluloid producer, was offering five rolls of color film to selected young filmmakers; the resulting films would screen at the festival. The following day, Beavers met Ledoux and René Micha, the Belgian poet, critic, and screenwriter, for lunch, where Ledoux shared Beavers’s film proposal (a study of bourgeoning sexuality which climaxed in ejaculation) with Micha. “Ah, yes, alas,” he sighed in response.
But if Beavers’s proposal struck the two men as pubescent, they swiftly became advocates. Ledoux selected Spiracle, Beavers’s first film, for the 1967 Knokke-le-Zoute competition, and purchased an answer print for the Royal Film Archive of Belgium; he and Micha appeared in Beavers’s Plan of Brussels the following year.2 And in a 1973 essay for Art International, Micha assigned Beavers an essential spot in the evolution of film language, following Lumière and Griffith, as the creator of an integrated, absolute cinema. “[His films] do not speak of motion. They are motion. They do not speak of light. They are light. They are nothing but themselves. Maybe we could call them ‘anti-films.’ Do they destroy the image of the cinema as we know it?”3
Early Monthly Segments (Robert Beavers, 1968–70/2002). © Robert Beavers, courtesy Temenos Archive.
In Brussels, Beavers toured the display of pre-cinematic instruments at the Film Archive’s Musée du Cinéma. He met Baron Leon Lambert, a banker, art collector, and patron of his new partner, the filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos, in his apartment above the Banque Lambert on Avenue Marnix.4 The white marble and glass facade of Gordon Bunshaft’s modernist building belied a Florentine shape. “It was like going to a Renaissance palace,” Beavers recalled. A monumental group of Giacometti women flanked Lambert’s penthouse entrance.
Beavers was en route to Greece—first Athens and then the Saronic island Hydra, where, in June, he made his second film and Markopoulos joined him. A dramatic narrative of lives entwined and devoted to filmmaking began to unfold. The two men had met in the foyer of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative in New York two years earlier: Beavers was sixteen and Markopoulos, a filmmaker and critic with an international reputation, thirty-seven. For Markopoulos, departure from the United States was energized by rising discontent with American screening and distribution conditions, the stifling of artists’ intentions by the “bad monies and grim politicizing” of institutional interests and curatorial egos, and a wish for greater control over the presentation of his work.5 Once in Europe, Beavers and Markopoulos gradually consolidated as a society of two. They stopped showing work in the United States in 1974 (and screened it only sporadically in Europe), halted distribution, and devoted their energies to making films. Markopoulos stopped printing the films he made and edited after 1971. The narrative peaks in Markopoulos’s vision of a Bayreuth-like cinematic sanctuary called the Temenos (ancient Greek for “a place set apart for the worship of a god” or “sacred grove”): a site devoted to the screening and study of his and Beavers’s films in remote Arcadia. The Temenos was a dream of hybrid enclosure and freedom as well as an effort of genealogical redefinition: Markopoulos set film in dialogue with ancient Greek religion and tied spectatorship to cure-seeking pilgrimage. He spent the final decade of his life reediting his previous films into a silent, eighty-hour magnum opus. The film, Eniaios (ancient Greek for “unity” and “uniqueness”), was designed for exclusive screening at the Temenos location: a field near Lyssarea, his ancestral village in the Peloponnese.6 The film was fully edited but unprinted when he died in 1992. He never saw it projected.
Beavers began to distribute his films regularly again after Markopoulos’s death. His 2005 Whitney Museum of American Art retrospective initiated a new phase of visibility; retrospectives at the Tate Modern, Austrian Film Museum, and Pacific Film Archive followed. At the time of the Whitney screenings, Roberta Smith lauded Beavers’s “astounding achievement”: “Mr. Beavers has spent his career being precociously ahead of schedule and also somewhat outside his time.”7 After five decades of nonstop filmmaking, a combination of the work’s intrinsic qualities and the historical trajectory of its circulation seems to make Beavers’s films persistently new.
From the Notebook of... (Robert Beavers, 1971/1998). © Robert Beavers, courtesy Temenos Archive.
THREE GUIDES
A decisive event—Beavers’s coming together with Markopoulos—joined a sequence of desires and ambitions already in motion. Greek-American Markopoulos was older, charismatic, supremely proud, and a self-identified visionary, and it is tempting to situate Beavers’s achievements exclusively in the container of their relationship and the ancient story of pedagogical love. Markopoulos was undeniably an essential guide and influence, obsessively dedicated to his singular vision, ceaseless in his pursuit of the unplumbed reparative potentials of cinema. He provided Beavers with protective encouragement to pursue his vocation no matter the material costs (which were severe: the two men often lived on the brink of poverty). “He taught me to invest in solitude,” Beavers said.
But the story of Beavers’s origins needs refinement. Markopoulos was not the first but the last of three figures in a sequence: “guiding personalities who brought me freedom.” Beavers was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1949 into a family characterized by vanishing fathers, and wives and daughters resourceful in the aftermath: “a matriarchy... with no continuity of males.” Beavers was four when his twenty-six-year-old father, an offset lithographer who worked at Bucks Printing near Fenway Park, died of lymphoma. The family had moved from the South End of Boston to East Weymouth, a nearby suburb, a year and a half before. They lived in a working-class enclave with a dozen small shingled homes arranged around a pond.
His Catholic maternal great-grandparents had moved to Lowell from Quebec City, and Beavers’s great-grandmother supported herself and two young daughters after her husband, unhappy in America, returned home. She ran a boarding house and cooked for single men who had moved to the mill town for work. It was day-and-night-long labor, and she placed Marie Rose, Beavers’s grandmother—the first of his three guides—in a convent. When Marie Rose got her first period, the terms of the convent’s shelter and education ended, and with six years of schooling, she began working in the Lowell mills and later did piecework at Pritzker’s textile factory in Boston. After annulling her early marriage to a Protestant Vermonter, she became an active union organizer whose provocations on the garment shop floor occasionally got her fired.
She was “the hidden strength and source in our tiny family,” Beavers says. “She gave me the strength to be so wild without thinking I was.” Generous without emotional condition, she supported Beavers’s path, regularly sending her Social Security payments to Europe. Beavers’s father’s Protestant family had emigrated from Holland to New Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, eventually moving up the Hudson and settling in Rochester, New York. In the face of his father’s early death, Beavers’s identifications ran up the maternal, Catholic side of the divided family tree.
AMOR (Robert Beavers, 1980). © Robert Beavers, courtesy Temenos Archive.
At seven, Beavers wandered into his East Weymouth neighbor’s backyard. He found diminutive Bernice Hodges sitting on a bench in a rock garden she had made—granite shards arranged around begonias and pine needle pathways—and asked her to read him a story. Mrs. Hodges chose Hawthorne’s A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys and Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha. As their friendship developed, the two always met on the porch. Mr. Hodges didn’t want children inside the house: the Hodges’s son Robin had died at three. “I was a reincarnation when I walked into the backyard,” Beavers said.
She was the second of Beavers’s guides. Her heroes were Lord Byron, Napoleon, and Sarah Bernhardt; she studied witchcraft and wore pant suits, a cameo, and short hair. And she evinced imaginative persistence in the face of major disappointments. Following the death of her son, a loss of faith (a Protestant minister she admired had a romantic affair), and financial catastrophe (her husband’s business failings led to bankruptcy and a fall in class status), she established a business for hand woodcarving, producing intricate ornamentation for Boston families and institutions, including Trinity Church. Mrs. Hodges taught Beavers to carve in her basement workshop.
A year after they met, Mrs. Hodges opened a low box, and showed Beavers a stack of loose black-and-white lithographs: Fra Filippo Lippi’s Madonna and Child, Raphael’s Deliverance of St. Peter, Michelangelo’s Prophets and Sibyls from the Sistine Chapel. She told Beavers about Renaissance artists’ multiplicity: no choice had to be made between painting, architecture, music, literature, science, engineering. Mrs. Hodges’s frescoes deposited Europe into Beavers’s imagination. It joined a picture of the Mediterranean that had already arrived: his mother had read him a children’s version of the Odyssey and, after fasting on Saturdays, he listened to the Latin liturgy on Sundays at St. Albert’s Cathedral in Weymouth. In eighth grade, Beavers discovered Sophocles’s Oedipus and Antigone in a Great Books Club, and he announced to a friend that he intended to go to school in Europe. “There was an image of Greece, and of Europe, before Gregory,” Beavers said.
The Ground (Robert Beavers, 1993–2001). © Robert Beavers, courtesy Temenos Archive.
Mrs. Hodges was a European guide, but she also exemplified a strain of “New England”—serious, independent, high-minded, strict, visionary, feminist, ethical, proud, aspirational, devoted to disseminating cultural nourishment. As a child, Beavers was impressed by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’s mural cycle The Inspiring Muses Acclaim Genius, Messenger of Light (ca. 1894–1896) at the Boston Public Library—allegorical renderings of the library’s intellectual resources—and as a teenager he joined the Boston Athenaeum. The Boston that captured Beavers’s imagination was a site of fused idealism and hardness: ordinary lives oriented toward survival and dominated by labor.
Mrs. Hodges was Protestant, like Beavers’s father: an essential figure of difference. “She took me outside my family,” Beavers said. “When you meet someone different as a child, it causes thoughts that you wouldn’t have otherwise.” She catalyzed new sequences of imaginative work that had material consequence in Beavers’s life. The exclusively female universe of the Beavers family was punctured not by a man but by Mrs. Hodges; the world began to crack open along fault lines she and Beavers carved together. “She told me stories that tried to give me some clues.”
From the start, their friendship unfolded via books. Mrs. Hodges had inherited the complete editions of Dickens, Thackeray, and Balzac from her father; Beavers was fascinated by the long stretches of identically sized and colored books. “With my working-class background, to see thirty volumes by one author—it was very unusual.” She gave teenage Beavers a book of Roman history by Tacitus; a few years later, he lent her Virginia Woolf’s The Waves after the filmmaker Charles Boultenhouse had recommended it to him. “The writing is very beautiful; the people are awful,” she reported back.
Beavers shot his first three rolls of 16mm film in 1966, all portraits: Markopoulos, his sister Gail, and Mrs. Hodges. He accidentally left the lens cap on while shooting his neighbor, but two long strips of frames were exposed: one in profile, the other a frontal pose in front of yellow forsythia blossoms.
- See a 1975 discussion between Annette Michelson and P. Adams Sitney on Knokke-le-Zoute as “the most important international event in the world of the avant-garde cinema.” Annette Michelson and P. Adams Sitney, “A Conversation on Knokke and the Independent Filmmaker,” Artforum 13, no. 9 (May 1975): 63–66. ↩
- At the 1967 Knokke-le-Zoute festival, Beavers saw films by Ernst Schmidt, Hans Jacob Siber, Edward Owens, Birgit and Wilhelm Hein, Paul Sharits, Joyce Wieland, Schoenherr, Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley, Robert Nelson, James Broughton, Jud Yalkut, Karl-Birger Blomdahl, Stephen Dwoskin, Werner Nekes and Dore O, and Lutz Mommartz. Notably, in his first two volumes of notes from 1967–1968, only one film receives commentary, but it registers solely as a warning about intention: “I realized how important the actual filming is and that it must be independent, not guided by ideas of what the filmmaker thinks should be filmed or how.” In his notes, Beavers identifies the film as “a short film by Guy LeClercq.” LeClerq, a Belgian artist (who had a role in Plan of Brussels) did not make any films; it is likely Beavers was referring to a 1967 film in which LeClercq starred: the short Belgian horror film Les Gardiens by Christian Mesnil. ↩
- René Micha, “Robert Beavers or Absolute Film,” trans. Noam Scheindlin, in Robert Beavers, ed. Rebekah Rutkoff (Vienna: Austrian Filmmuseum, 2017), 33. ↩
- Markopoulos’s Twice a Man (1964) had been awarded the inaugural $2,000 Prix Baron Lambert Prize at Knokke-le-Zoute in 1963, and Lambert, with a consortium of Belgian businessmen, was financing the completion of his film The Illiac Passion (1967). ↩
- Gregory Markopoulos, “Towards a Complete Order,” in Film as Film: The Collected Writings of Gregory J. Markopoulos, ed. Mark Webber (London: Visible Press, 2014), 365. ↩
- Markopoulos’s father was born in Lyssarea. The filmmaker first visited the village in 1958 when he was making the film Serenity in Greece. ↩
- Roberta Smith, “Avant-Garde Films ‘Repatriated’ at Last,” New York Times, October 21, 2005. ↩