Early Monthly Segments (1968–70/2002) by Robert Beavers

Friday, January 30, 2026, 7:00 pm

Robert Beavers: Filmmaker in Residence Program 1

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

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: Program 1
In Conversation: Robert Beavers and Rebekah Rutkoff

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

Early Monthly Segments, filmed when Robert Beavers was eighteen and nineteen years old, is a stylized work of self-portraiture, depicting the filmmaker and his companion Gregory J. Markopoulos in their Swiss lodgings. “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 Count of Days is not an account so much as an accounting of the days in which three separate persons are related at points.” (Tom Chomont).

SCREENING:
Early Monthly Segments (Switzerland/Germany/Greece; 1968–70/2002); 35mm, color, silent, 33 minutes. Print from the maker.
Winged Dialogue (Greece; 1967/2000); 16mm, color, sound, 3 minutes, Print form the maker.
Plan of Brussels (Belgium; 1968/2000); 16mm, color, sound, 18 minutes. Print from the maker.
The Count of Days (Switzerland; 1969/2001); 16mm, color, sound, 18 minutes, Print form the maker.
TRT: 75 minutes