The Sparrow Dream (2022) by Robert Beavers

Friday, February 6, 2026, 3:30 pm

Robert Beavers: Mosse Lecture

In Conversation: Robert Beavers and Deniz Göktürk

BERKELEY ART MUSEUM AND PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE
2155 Center St
Berkeley

Presented in association with Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Admission: FREE
Tickets available at the admissions desk beginning at 2:30pm

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
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Robert Beavers: Mosse Lecture
In Conversation: Robert Beavers and Deniz Göktürk

Deniz Göktürk is a Professor of German and Film at UC Berkeley.

The UC Berkeley Department of German and BAMPFA are pleased to host Robert Beavers’ Mosse Lecture. Beavers has worked as an artist and made poetic films since 1966. He is the cinematographer, editor and creative force behind his films, which are highly regarded by film critics, curators, fellow artists and filmgoers. Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1949, he has resided in Europe since 1967 and made Berlin his home for the past two decades. Beavers will speak about his film aesthetic and discuss the relationship of history, memory and place in his work. The lecture includes Diminished Frame, from the early part of his career, and The Sparrow Dream, which he completed in 2022. 

This annual lecture is generously supported by the Mosse Foundation and reflects the foundation’s mission to promote cultural exchange and political engagement. The Mosse Lectures were originally founded in 1997 at Humboldt University in Berlin to commemorate the history of the Mosse family, their patronage of the arts, and their contributions to intellectual life through the German-Jewish publishing house run by Rudolf Mosse and the newspaper Berliner Tageblatt.

SCREENING:
Diminished Frame (Germany; 1970/2001); 16mm, color, sound, 24 minutes. Print from the maker.
The Sparrow Dream (Germany/US); 16mm, color, sound, 29 minutes. Print from the maker.