From the Notebook of… (1971/98) by Robert Beavers
Saturday, January 31, 2026, 4:30 pm
Robert Beavers: Filmmaker in Residence Program 3
In Conversation: Robert Beavers and Christopher Scott
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 3
In Conversation: Robert Beavers and Christopher Scott
Christopher Scott is a Lecturer in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley.
From the Notebook of… is a masterful work of structural harmony, binary oppositions and self-reflexive form. The title refers to Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook and to the filmmaker’s own written observations on filmmaking techniques. The filmmaker’s view of the world (in this case, Florence) is mediated by a careful sequencing of moving mattes, which split the screen vertically, giving the effect of a page turning in a book. The Painting uses masking and rack focus techniques to disclose portions of The Martyrdom of Saint Hippolytus, a fifteenth-century altarpiece. Robert “Beavers gives a… rarefied psychodramatic jolt, juxtaposing shots of Gregory J. Markopoulos, bisected by shafts of light, with a torn photo of himself and the recurring image of a shattered windowpane” (J. Hoberman).
SCREENING:
From the Notebook of… (Italy; 1971/98); 35mm, color, sound, 48 minutes. Print from the maker.
The Painting (Switzerland/US; 1972/99); 35mm, color, sound, 13 minutes. Print from the BAMPFA Collection.
TRT: 61 minutes