SFCINEMATHEQUE

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Saturday, October 10, 2009

My Hand Outstretched…

Films of Robert Beavers: Program III

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts





Robert Beavers in person
(See Thursday October 8 for Series Overview)
[members: $6 / non-members: $10]
Order advance tickets here.

“In Palinode a disk-shapped matte continually shifting in and out of focus alternately blocks part of the image or contains it. Its respiratory rhythm matches musical fragments of Wladimir Vogel’s Wagadu, as the camera studies a middle-aged male singer in Zurich, singing, eating, window shopping, meeting a young girl.” (P. Adams Sitney); “There is a balance in Diminished Frame between a sense of the past seen in the views of West Berlin, filmed in black-and-white, and a sense of the present in which I filmed myself showing how the color is being created by placing filters in the camera’s aperture.” (Robert Beavers); The Painting uses masking and rack focus techniques to disclose portions of The Martyrdom of Saint Hippolytus, a fifteenth-century altarpiece. “Beavers gives a… rarefied psychodramatic jolt, juxtaposing shots of Gregory Markopoulos, bisected by shafts of light, with a torn photo of himself and the recurring image of a shattered windowpane.” (J. Hoberman); “Winged Dialogue details with growing clarity the desperate beauty and sexuality of the body animated by its soul.” (Tom Chomont); “In Plan of Brussels, Beavers filmed himself in a hotel room… while in rapid rhythmic cutting, and sometimes in superimposition, the phantasmagoria of people he met in Brussels and images from the streets flood his mind.” (P. Adams Sitney); “The first half of Still Light explores delicate nuances of lighting, color and depth as Beavers shoots the face of a young man in various locales on the Greek island of Hydra… The second half was shot in the London flat of Nigel Gosling. The two halves bring to mind any number of structuralist binarisms: youth and age, creation and criticism, action and reflection, living landscape and mummified text.” (Ed Halter); In Wingseed, Beavers draws comparisons between the pastoral beauty of a Greek hillside and that of the male form. (Susan Oxtoby)