Diminished Frame (1970/2001) by Robert Beavers

Saturday, January 31, 2026, 2:00 pm

Robert Beavers: Filmmaker in Residence Program 2

In Conversation: Robert Beavers and Rebekah Rutkoff

BERKELEY ART MUSEUM AND PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE
2155 Center St
Berkeley

Presented in association with Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Admission: $18 General / $12 Cinematheque Members
Event tickets here
NOTE! Are you planning on attending both programs on this date? Same day programs are $5 (for general and discount admissions).

Robert Beavers: Filmmaker in Residence
January 30 – February 7, 2026 

This career retrospective, combined with a filmmaker residency, offers Bay Area audiences a chance to see American avant-garde filmmaker Robert Beavers’ highly rewarding body of work and engage with him as an artist. His films are exceptional for their visual beauty, aural texture, and depth of emotional expression.

Born in 1949 in Brookline, Massachusetts, Beavers began to make films in the mid-1960s in New York City. By the end of that decade, he had relocated to Europe with fellow American filmmaker Gregory J. Markopoulos, who would be his lifelong companion until Markopoulos’ death in 1992. The majority of Beavers’s films were shot in the 1970s and 1980s in Italy, Switzerland, Germany and Greece. Between 1994 and 2002, the artist involved himself in reediting the images and creating new soundtracks for his eighteen-film cycle, My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure.

Beavers’ films embody the ideals of the Renaissance in their fascination with perception, psychology, literature, the natural world, architectural space, musical phrasing and aesthetic beauty. For many years now, Beavers has made Berlin his home with fellow filmmaker Ute Aurand. BAMPFA will present seven films he has made since 2007, which continue his exploration of sense of place, reflection and harmony. (Susan Oxtoby, Director of Film and Senior Film Curator; BAMPFA)

This series is co-presented by the UC Berkeley Department of German, with support from the Mosse Foundation. Thanks also to the Townsend Center for the Humanities.

Robert Beavers: Filmmaker in Residence
1   2   3   4   5   Lecture   6   7

Robert Beavers: Program 2
In Conversation: Robert Beavers and Rebekah Rutkoff

Rebekah Rutkoff is the author of Double Vision: The Cinema of Robert Beavers (2024). 

“In Palinode a disk-shaped 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 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” (Ed Halter, New York Press). 

SCREENING:
Palinode (Switzerland; 1970/2001); 16mm, color, sound. 21 minutes. Print from the maker.
Diminished Frame (Germany; 1970/2001) 16mm, b&w/color, sound, 24 minutes. Print from the maker.
Still Light (Greece; 1970/2001); 16mm, color, sound, 25 minutes. Print from the maker.
TRT: 70 minutes