Guests: Robert Beavers x Eva Claus
’25
Lange Steenstraat 14
B-9000 Gent
Dedication: Bernice Hodges © Robert Beavers
Lange Steenstraat 14
B-9000 Gent
With great honor, we welcome Robert Beavers and Eva Claus for a program around their new films, Dedication: Bernice Hodges and To Be A Day.
In a career spanning five decades, Robert Beavers has distinguished himself as one of the most important American experimental filmmakers. His body of work ranks among the most revered in the canon of avant-garde cinema. Beaver’s films are exceptional for their visual beauty, aural texture and depth of emotional expression. Although born and raised in the United States, he moved to Europe in 1967 with fellow American filmmaker Gregory J. Markopoulos, who remained his lifelong companion until his death in 1992. The notions of self-reflexivity and portraiture are central to Beavers’s cinema, as is the act of making things by hand. The dialogue between the tool and the hand is a preoccupation in his work, already apparent in Early Monthly Segments (1968). Beavers’s attention to the physicality of the film medium is evident also in the editing, a fully manual process that leads to a unique form of phrasing. Harry Tomicek calls it a form of “cinematic breathing,” an exchange of speech and silence, emergence and concealment.
Living and working in Brussels, Eva Claus is an audio-visual artist working primarily with 16mm film. Her practice is driven by observations of (un)expected encounters with landscapes and people, natural habitats, circularity and means of film itself. She was educated at the Friedl Kubelka School for independent film in Vienna and obtained an MA in Photography at KASK, the Royal Academy of Arts in Ghent. Her new film, To Be A Day, has been shown in Zurich and Bangkok; this is the first screening in Belgium.
Eva Claus is part of the dedicated circle of filmmakers and friends assisting Robert Beavers in the ongoing restoration of Gregory Markopoulos’ 80-hour magnum opus, Eniaios, which was fully edited but never printed during his lifetime. Since 2014, the restored cycles of Eniaios have been presented at open-air screenings at a site in Arcadia, on the Peloponnese, chosen by Markopoulos, which he called the Temenos. This month, they have reached the milestone of completing the full restoration of the work!
The screening will be followed by a conversation with Robert Beavers and Eva Claus.
Rebekah Rutkoff’s new book, Double Vision: The Cinema of Robert Beavers (2024), will be available this evening at a special discount.
Eva Claus
To Be A Day
A window to the outside world, just like the camera’s frame. Through this window, I watch the sunrise. To Be a Day captures the sun casting its light over a vast seascape on Fogo Island, Canada. Between sunrise and sunset, a series of white dots appear. These white circles reflect the moonlight, guiding fishermen as they walk across the pier to their sheds and boats in the early morning. (EC)
To Be A Day © Eva Claus
Robert Beavers
Early Monthly Segments
Filmed when Beavers was 18 and 19 years old, Early Month Segments is an intimate portrait of the artist and his partner, the filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos, in their Swiss apartment – a time, he recalls, when they were “protected by solitude and the spirit that came from our dedication to filmmaking.” The film would become the opening section of Beavers’s cycle My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure.
Early Monthly Segments © Robert Beavers
Robert Beavers
Pitcher of Colored Light
I have filmed my mother’s house and her garden. The shadows play an essential part in the mixture of loneliness and peace that exists here. The seasons move from the garden into the house, projecting rich diagonals in the early morning or late afternoon. Each shadow is a subtle balance of stillness and movement and shows the vital instability of space. Its special quality opens a passage to the subjective. A voice within the film speaks to memory. The walls are screens through which I pass to the inhabited privacy. We experience a place through the perspective of where we come from and hear another’s voice through our own acoustic. The sense of place is never separate from the moment. (RB)
Pitcher of Colored Light © Robert Beavers
Robert Beavers
Dedication: Bernice Hodges
I walked into Bernice Hodges’s garden when I was seven years old and asked her to read to me. She was in her mid-seventies. Out of this came an important friendship. In 1966, I tried to film her – it was perhaps the second time that I had put a roll of film in the Bolex camera, and I was very nervous; part of the time I inadvertently left the lens cap on while filming. I was so disappointed that I threw the footage away except for two short film strips. Decades later, during the making of The Sparrow Dream (2022), I re-filmed these two film strips on my editing table and objects associated with her, such as a wooden tray that she had carved. She was the first person to explain to me what an artist might be and in teaching me how to carve wood, I learned how to go with the grain or against it. (RB)
Dedication: Bernice Hodges © Robert Beavers
Robert Beavers © Adam Bartos