Ruskin (1975/97) by Robert Beavers

Sunday, February 1, 2026, 3:30 pm

Robert Beavers: Filmmaker in Residence Program 4

In Conversation: Robert Beavers and Erik Ulman

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

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 4
In Conversation: Robert Beavers and Erik Ulman

Erik Ulman is an Advanced Lecturer in Music at Stanford University.

Work Done transports the viewer to a variety of times and places. Old-world customs are juxtaposed with contemporary urban scenes. Color filters heighten the contrast between the natural and man-made worlds. Ruskin foregrounds Robert Beavers’ love of literature, architecture and landscape. (The filmmaker’s hand rests on a volume of John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice, and much of the film is shot in the environs of Venice, London and the Swiss Alps.) AMOR uses themes of cutting and sewing as metaphors. Cloth is cut and fabric is sewn, shrubs are trimmed and hedges form majestic garden archways and a male figure claps his hands as if to signal a sync cue on which there is a visual cut. Central to this work are the complex emotions surrounding love, separation and the metonymic twinning of objects, including that of edited image and sutured sound.

SCREENING:
Work Done (Italy/Switzerland; 1972/99); 35mm, color, sound, 22 minutes. Print from the BAMPFA Collection
Ruskin (Italy/Switzerland/UK; 1975/97); 35mm, b&wcolor, sound, 45 minutes. Print form the maker.
AMOR (Italy/Austria; 1980); 35mm, color, sound, 15 minutes Print from the BAMPFA Collection
TRT: 82 minutes