Robert Beavers | Fragment d'une oeuvre : Robert Beavers | An evening with Robert Beavers

We are delighted to announce the first retrospective in France of Robert Beavers' work at Ardèche Images/États généraux du film documentaire - Lussas. Ten films will be screened, hosted by Federico Rossin in the presence of Robert Beavers.

"Robert Beavers (Brookline, Massachusetts, 1949) is one of the most important avant-garde filmmakers of the second half of the 19th century. Since 1967, he lives and directs his films in Europe: his work is the result of a 16mm artisanal practice, an inherited practice of the rigor of the structural cinema of the lvric research of the New American Cinema (Gregory Markopoulos and Stan Brakhage). His films are dense works, constructed through a lush metaphorical phrase and a complex musical rhythm: the editing process is conceived very slowly, first on paper and then realized entirely by hand. His images are of majestic plastic beauty and luminous pictorial sensuality. These are portraits of places and loved ones, nurtured by a great figurative and literary culture, and a deep link to the human landscape, art history (the Renaissance) and European material culture (Greece, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany and Italy). At the beginning of his work, the process of making the film was at the very heart of the narrative, then, with maturity, modernist self-reflexivity became pure visual thinking and phenomenological intuition, and above all memory writing. Cinema is for Beavers an art where the material procedures of filmmaking have deep parallels with the archetypal forms of traditional work (sewing, architecture, etc.)"