Sotiros, 1976-78/1996, 35mm, color, sound, 25minutes, © Robert Beavers, courtesy Temenos Archive
Erna Hecey is very pleased to announce the screening of Three Films by Robert Beavers, Sotiros (USA 1976–78/1996, 35mm, 25min), The Stoas (USA 1991–97, 16mm, 22min) and The Ground (USA/CH/GR 1993/2001, 35mm, 20min) at Kino Arsenal (Berlin) within its continued series of screenings dedicated to the legacy of Amos Vogel, entitled :
"The gatekeepers exist to be overthrown," Amos Vogel – Repeats and Responses (III),
The screening will be held in the presence of Robert Beavers on January 29, 2022 at 8 pm.
After Robert Beavers presented in September 2021 at Kino Arsenal the early films of Gregory Markopoulos that Vogel held in high regard, a Vogel reference also provides the opportunity to screen his films. In 1997 at the New York Film Festival, Vogel saw Sotiros, 1976-78/1996, The Stoas 1991-97, and Efpsychi 1983-86 - which were mainly produced from material shot in Greece and were edited in relationship to one another - and recommended them to Forum : “Strongly formed visual poems, … images repeat, camera movements are carefully controlled, one has the strong feeling of strophes.” To create an even greater sense of density, the third film will be replaced at the Arsenal screening by The Ground, in which Beavers in exploring the cinematic space reveals the stonemason in the filmmaker.
Born in Brookline Massachusetts in 1949, Robert Beavers attended public schools in Weymouth (MA), then Boston Latin School and Deerfield Academy before meeting the filmmaker Gregory J. Markopoulos and making his first 16mm film in 1966 in New York. It was shown at the Fourth International Experimental Film Competition in Knokke-le-Zoute (Belgium) the following year. By that time Beavers had re-located to Europe with Markopoulos, and over the next decades he made films in Greece, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Italy and most recently the U.S.A. The one fixed point was the Temenos Archive in Uster, Switzerland. In the past few years there have been retrospectives of his films at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate Modern, Pacific Film Archive and Austrian Filmmuseum. His fellowships include Berliner Künstlerprogramm – DAAD, Berlin, John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, NYC, Fellowship, St. John’s College, Oxford University, National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. USA, to name a few.
He lives with the filmmaker, Ute Aurand in Berlin and Massachusetts and continues to make films on 16mm. In 2017, the Austrian Filmmuseum published a collection of essays on his filmmaking.
Erna Hecey is delighted to announce a Screening and Exhibition project with Robert Beavers later in 2022.
