What is Film? Program 46

Robert Beavers - (born 1949) is an American experimental filmmaker, whose works have been dazzling audiences with his breathtakingly precise and poetic meditations on history, place, art and architecture. Until the late 1990s, Beavers worked in relative isolation and rarely presented his films. Since the year 2000 the reception of his work has intensified, especially in the art world, while the opportunities to see it have remained scarce. Recently, larger shows were organized at New York’s Whitney Museum (2005), the Tate Modern in London (2007), and the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley (2009). The heightened experience offered by these retrospectives is less that of a spectacular ‘cultural event’, but a rare immersion into the beauty and intelligence of craft: the manifold forms (and results) of physical labor which Robert Beavers has filmed since 1967, as well as his own craft which mirrors and extends all the others – and in which practice and meaning can become one.

Work Done (1972) 16mm, 34 min
Ruskin (1974–75) 16mm, 50 min
Amor (1980) 16mm, 14 min