“My Hand Outstretched” with Robert Beavers – NRATI
Artist in attendance.
In conjunction with My Hand Outstretched…, a screening of the work of Robert Beavers, presented as part of TIFF’s Free Screen series, this salon will feature texts selected by Beavers to compliment his films.
As noted by the Free Screen:
Artist in attendance.
In conjunction with My Hand Outstretched…, a screening of the work of Robert Beavers, presented as part of TIFF’s Free Screen series, this salon will feature texts selected by Beavers to compliment his films.
As noted by the Free Screen:
I think of filmmaking like architecture: the entire process is nourished through many stages of development, and the vision of each part leads to the next. The work does not exclude spontaneity. The filming reaches forward and extends a central impulse. It has a chronology. Observation draws out an interior richness.
—Robert Beavers
Beavers began making films while still a teenager, after leaving his home in Weymouth, Massachusetts, for New York City at age sixteen. A few years later, he left for Europe and was joined by Gregory J. Markopoulos, with whom he would share his life until Markopoulos’ death in 1992. Markopoulos was both a mentor and champion for Beavers’s work, but neither artist circulated their films in the last decades of Markopoulos’s life, making them practically invisible.
When Beavers’s films did emerge in the beginning of this century—most notably during TIFF’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 2002, in a three-screening series that begat the Wavelengths programme the very next year—they were a revelation. Eighteen films were eventually released as a full thematic cycle, collected under the title My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure. The films, as Beavers says, grew “out of my relation to Gregory Markopoulos, protected by solitude and the spirit that came from our dedication to filmmaking.” As such, seeing them in relationship to Markopoulos’s films shows both a dialogue and unique counterpoint between the two filmmakers.
Three of the films shown in the upcoming screening derive from Beavers’s eighteen-film cycle, and they are followed by his most recently completed film, The Suppliant. Employing a meticulous editing style, Beavers cycles through evocations of architecture (Greek arcades), archaic customs (bookbinding, ancient refrigeration techniques), landscape (a stream in Lousios, the barren landscape of Hydra), and hands performing an action. The hands in The Stoas are cupped as if holding vases—the initial inspiration for the film. Beavers never shot the vases, so the hands become a visual notion of presence in the face of absence—a beautiful metaphor for the place his work now fills in the continued dialogue around film’s evolving possibilities.
Those attending this iteration of No Reading are invited to join Beavers for his screening on Monday, December 3, 2012, 6:30 PM at the TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West).
No Reading After the Internet (Toronto) is supported by the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto. Special thanks to the Free Screen and the Images Festival for their support of this salon.
No Reading After the Internet is a salon series dealing with cultural texts, which are read aloud by participants. The particular urgency of the project is in reforming publics and experimenting with the act of reading, as its own media form, in our moment. No Reading After the Internet (Toronto) is a project of the efforts of cheyanne turions.
Saturday 1 December 2012 –
Non-members: Free
Members: Free
Location:
Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto
1137 Dupont Street
Toronto ON Canada