All films have been produced, written, photographed, sound recorded and edited by Robert Beavers. All films were photographed on 16mm. All camera originals or negatives, internegatives, interpositives, magnetic sound tracks, optical sound tracks and projection copies of "My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure" are preserved in the Temenos archive.

* Indicates those films that are included in the cycle "My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure".

Spiracle
1966, 16mm, colour, sound, 12 minutes.
Cast: Tom Chomont.
Filmed in the USA (New York City).
First Public Screening: exprmntl 4, Casino Knokke-le-Zoute, December 1967.
Silent copy preserved in La Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, Brussels.
Sound copy held in Filmkundliches Archiv Leo Schönecker, Cologne.

On the Everyday Use of the Eyes of Death
1966, 16mm, colour, silent, 9 minutes.
Filmed in Italy (Rome), on Agfa-Gaevert reversal film.
Note: This film is no longer screened. The camera original was destroyed by the filmmaker.

Winged Dialogue*
1967/2000, 16mm, colour, sound, 3 minutes.
Cast: Gregory Markopoulos, Robert Beavers.
Filmed in Greece (Island of Hydra)
and
Plan of Brussels*
1968/2000, 16mm, colour, sound, 18 minutes.
Cast: Robert Beavers, Giséle Frumkin, René Micha, Jacques Ledoux, Pierre Apraxine, Dimitri Balachoff and others.
Text: "Duvelor" by Michel de Ghelderode.
Filmed in Belgium (Brussels).
Note: The final edit combines both films on a single reel.
Winged Dialogue details with growing clarity the desperate beauty and sexuality of the body animated by it's soul, essence blindly reaching out, touching, in brilliant patterns through and beyond those of the vanishing images, expressed vividly in the after-image on the mind, on the soul's eye. (Tom Chomont, a note on Winged Dialogue).
Shedding all traces of narrative in Plan of Brussels, Beavers filmed himself in a hotel room, both at his work desk and lying naked on the bed, while in rapid rhythmic cutting, and sometime in superimposition, the phantasmagoria of people he met in Brussels and images from the streets flood his mind. (P. Adams Sitney, Film Comment).
First public screening: Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Vienna, 12 May 1996.
Original versions:
Winged Dialogue, 1967. 16mm film, colour, sound, 18 minutes.
First Public Screenings: International Short Film Week, National Film Theatre, London, 25 August 1968.
Plan of Brussels, 1968. 16mm film, colour, sound, 29 minutes.
First Public Screenings: Film Klub Zürich, 13 March 1969. Projection copy preserved in La Cinémathèque Royal de Belgique, Brussels.

Early Monthly Segments *
1968-70/2002, 35mm, colour, silent, 33 minutes.
Cast: Robert Beavers, Gregory Markopoulos, Tom Chomont.
Filmed in Switzerland, Germany (Berlin), and Greece.
Early Monthly Segments, filmed when Beavers was 18 and 19 years old, now forms the opening to his film cycle, "My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure." It is a highly stylized work of self-portraiture, depicting filmmaker and companion Gregory J. Markopoulos in their Swiss apartment. The film functions as a diary, capturing aspects of home life with precise attention to detail, documenting the familiar with great love and transforming objects and ordinary personal effects into a highly charged work of homoeroticism. (Susan Oxtoby, Toronto International Film Festival).
First Public Screening: Toronto International Film Festival, September 2003.

The Count of the Days *
1969/2001, 16mm, colour, sound, 21 minutes.
Cast: Stefan Sadowski and others.
Text: Fragments from "Petermann verliess den Hinterhof" by Stefan Sadkowski.
Filmed in Switzerland (Zürich).
Note: The final edit includes part of Early Monthly Segments on the same reel.
The film is seen as though upon and through the structure of its spiritual partitions. One might say that there are three elements or levels to the images: narrative, descriptive or analytic, and abstract. The Count of Days is not an account so much as an accounting of the essence of the days in which three separate persons are related at points ... a penetration through the masks and habits of these days to reveal the nature of the charade and the arena in which it is enacted. (Tom Chomont, Film Culture).
First Public Screening: Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Vienna, 21 May 1996.
Original Version: The Count of Days, 1969, 16mm film, colour, sound, 43 minutes.
First Public Screening: XVIII Int. Film Festival Mannheim, October 1969.
Projection copies preserved in La Cinémathèque Suisse, Lausanne, Study Collection of Anthology Film Archives, New York, and Australia National Film & Sound Archive, Canberra.

View
1969, 16mm, colour, sound, 8 minutes.
Filmed in Switzerland (Zürich).
Note: This film is no longer screened. The camera original was destroyed by the filmmaker.
Projection copy in Australian National Film& Sound Archive, Canberra.

Palinode *
1970/2001, 16 mm, colour, sound, 21 minutes.
Cast: Derrek Olsen and others.
Music: "Wagadu" by Wladimir Vogel.
Filmed in Switzerland (Zürich).
Note: The final edit includes part of Early Monthly Segments on the same reel.
In Palinode a disk-shaped matte continually shifting in and out of focus alternately blocks part of the image or contains it. Its respiratory rhythm matches operatic fragments of Wladimir Vogel's "Wagadu", as the camera studies a middle-aged male singer in Zurich, singing, eating, window shopping, meeting a young girl. The filmmaker told himself, "Don't let yourself know what that film is about while you are making it." (P. Adams Sitney, Film Comment).
First Public Screening: Österreichishes Filmmuseum, Vienna, 21 May 1996.
Original Version: Palinode, 1969, 16mm film, sound, 34 minutes.
First Public Screening: Club Nuovo Teatro, Milan, April 1970.
Projection copy preserved in La Cinémathèque Royal de Belgique, Brussels.

Diminished Frame *
1970/2001, 16mm, black-and-white and colour, sound, 24 minutes.
Cast: Robert Beavers and others.
Filmed in Germany (West Berlin).
Note: The final edit includes part of Early Monthly Segments on the same reel.
There is a balance in Diminished Frame between a sense of the past seen in the views of West Berlin, filmed in black& white and a sense of the present in which I filmed myself showing how the colour is being created by placing filters in the camera's aperture. It is the space of the city and of the filmmaker. I search for signs of war's aftermath and a few moments of daily life. (Robert Beavers).
First Public Screening: Österreichishes Filmmuseum, Vienna, 22 May 1996.
Original Version: Diminished Frame, 1970, 16mm, black-and-white and colour, sound, 30 minutes.
First Public Screening: Filmstudio 70, Rome, April 1971.
Projection copies preserved in La Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, Brussels, Müncher Filmmuseum and Australian National Film & Sound Archive, Canberra.

Still Light *
1970/2001, 16mm, colour, sound, 25 minutes.
Cast: Ronald Krueck, Nigel Gosling.
Filmed in Greece (Island of Hydra) and England (London).
The first half of the film explores delicate nuances of lighting, colour and depth as Beavers shoots the face of a young man in various locales on the Greek island of Hydra, using a variety of customized masks and filters. The man's face remains constant throughout, surrounded by iconic elements in the landscape, like a pulsating Renaissance portrait. Still Light brings to mind any number of structuralist binarisms: youth and age, creation and criticism, action and reflection, living landscape and mummified text. (Ed Halter, New York Press).
First Public Screening: Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Vienna, 22 May 1996.
Original Version: Still Light, 1970, 16mm, colour, sound, 60 minutes.
First Public Screening: Goethe House, New York, 13 December 1071 (unconfirmed).
Projection copy preserved in the Study Collection of Anthropology Film Archives, New York.

From the Notebook of ... *
1971/1998, 35mm, colour, sound, 48 minutes.
Cast: Robert Beavers, Gregory Markopoulos and others.
Filmed in Italy (Florence).
From the Notebook of ... was shot in Florence and takes as its point of departure Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks and Paul Valéry's essay on da Vinci's process. These two elements suggest an implicit comparison between the treatment of space in Renaissance art and the moving image. The film marks a critical development in the artist's work in that he repeatedly employs a series of rapid pans and upward tilts along the city's buildings or facades, often integrating glimpses of his own face. As Beavers notes in his writing on the film, the camera movements are tied to the filmmakers' presence and suggests his investigative gaze. (Henriette Huldisch, Whitney Museum of Art)
First Public Screening: New York Film Festival "Views fro the Avante-Garde", 9 October 1999.
Original Version: From the Notebook of ..., 1971, 16mm, colour, sound, 60 minutes.
First Public Screening: Centro Culturale San Fedele, Milan, 11 February 1972.
Projection copies in Museum of Modern Art Film Department, New York, La Cinémathèque Royal de Belgique, Brussels, Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Vienna and Australian National Film & Sound Archive, Canberra.

The Painting *
1972/1999, 16mm, colour, sound, 13 minutes.
Cast: Robert Beavers, Gregory Markopoulos.
Filmed in Switzerland (Berne) and USA (Boston).
The Painting intercuts shots of traffic navigating the old-world remnants of downtown Bern, Switzerland, with details from a 15th-century altarpiece, "The Martyrdom of St. Hippolytus". The painting shows the calm, near-naked saint in a peaceful landscape, a frozen moment before four horses tear his body to pieces while an audience of soigné nobles look on; in the movie's revised version, Beavers gives it a comparably rarefied psychodramatic jolt, juxtaposing shots of Gregory Markopoulos, bisected by shafts of light, with a torn photo of himself and the recurring image of a shattered windowpane. (J. Hoberman, The Village Voice)
First Public Screening: Kusthalle Basel, 19 January 1999.
Original Version: The Painting, 1972, 16mm, colour, sound, 20 minutes.
First Public Screening: Cinematografischer Salon, Innsbruck, 14-15 October 1972.
Projection copy preserved in the Study Collection of Anthology Film Archives, New York.

Work done *
1972/1999, 35mm, colour, sound, 22 minutes.
Filmed in Italy (Florence) and Switzerland (the Grisons).
Bracing in its simplicity, Work done was shot in Florence and the Alps, and celebrates an archaic Europe. Contemplating a stone vault cooled by blocks of ice or hand stitching of a massive tome or the frying of a local delicacy, Beavers considers human activities without dwelling on human protagonists. Like many of Beavers' films, Work done is based on a series of textural transformative equivalences: the workshop and the field, the book and the forest, the mound of cobblestones and a distant mountain. (J. Hoberman, The Village Voice)
First Public Screening: New York Film Festival. "Views from the Avant-Garde", 9 October 1999.
Original Version: Work done, 1972, 16mm, colour, sound, 34 minutes.
First Public Screening: Festival of Independent Avant-Garde Film, National Film Theatre, London, 14 September 1973.

Ruskin *
1975/1997, 35mm, black-and-white and colour, sound, 45 minutes.
Filmed in Italy (Venice), Switzerland (the Grisons) and England (London).
Ruskin visits the sites of John Ruskin's work: London, the Alps and, above all, Venice, where the camera's attention to masonry and the interaction of architecture and water mimics the author's descriptive analysis of the "stones" of the city. The sound of pages turning and the image of a book, Ruskin's 'Unto This Last', forcibly reminds us that a poet's perceptions and in this case his political economy, are preserved and reawakened through acts of reading and writing. (P. Adams Sitney, Film Comment).
First Public Screening: Auditorium du Louvre, Paris, 25 May 1998.
Original Version: Ruskin, 1975, 16mm, black-and-white and colour, sound, 60 minutes.
First Public Screening: Festival Internazionale del Film sull'Arte e di Biografie d'Artisti, Asolo, 30 May 1974.
Projection copy in Australia National Film & Sound Archive, Canberra.
Second Version: Ruskin, 1976, 16mm, black-and-white and colour, sound, 65 minutes.
First Public Screening: unknown.
Projection copy in Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

Sotiros *
1976-78/1996, 35mm, colour, sound, 25 minutes.
Cast: Robert Beavers, Gregory Markopoulos.
Filmed in Greece (Athens, Sparta, Leonidion), Austria (Graz, Rein) and Switzerland (Berne).
Note: Three films are now combined within a single work.
In Sotiros, there is an unspoken dialogue and a seen dialogue, The first is held between the intertitles and the images; the second is moved by the tripod and by the emotions of the filmmaker. Both dialogues are interwoven with the sunlight;s movement as it circles the room, touching each wall and corner, detached and intimate. (Robert Beavers).
First Public Screening: International Film Festival Rotterdam, 5 February 2000.
Original Versions:
Sotrios Responds, 1975-76, 16mm, colour, sound, 25 minutes.
Sotiros (Alone), 1976-77, 16mm, colour, sound, 12 minutes.
Sotiros in the Elements, 1978, 16mm, colour, sound, 6 minutes.
First Public Screening: Movie 1, Zürich, 12-13 May 1978.
Projection copies in Filmpodium Zürich, Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Vienna and Australia National Film & Sound Archive, Canberra.

AMOR *
1980, 35mm, colour, sound, 15 minutes.
Cast: Robert Beavers.
Filmed in Italy (Rome, Verona) and Austria (Salzburg).
AMOR is an exquisite lyric, shot in Rome and at the natural theatre of Salzburg. The recurring sounds of cutting cloth, hands clapping, hammering, and tapping underline the associations of the montage of short camera movements, which bring together the making of a suit, the restoration of a building, and details of a figure, presumably Beavers himself, standing in the natural theatre in a new suit, making a series of hand movements and gestures. A handsomely designed Italian banknote suggests the aesthetic economy of the film: the tailoring, trimming, and chiseling point to the editing of the film itself. (P. Adams Sitney, Film Comment).
First Public Screening: Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Vienna, 4 March 1980.
Projection copies in Walter Bechtler Stiftung, Zürich, and Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Vienna.

Efpsychi *
1983/1996, 35mm, colour, sound, 20 minutes.
Cast: Vassili Tsindoukidis.
Filmed in Greece (Athens).
The details of the young actor's face - his eyes, eyebrows, earlobe, chin, etc. - are set opposite the old buildings in the market quarter of Athens, where every street is named after a classic ancient Greek playwright. In this setting of intense stillness, sometimes interrupted by sudden sounds and movements in the streets, he speaks a single word, "teleftea", meaning the last (one), and as he repeats this word, it moves differently each time across his face and gains another sense from one scene to the next, suggesting the uncanny proximity of eroticism, the sacred and chance. (Robert Beavers).
First Public Screening: New York Film Festival. "Views from the Avant-garde", October 1997.
Original Version: Efpsychi, 1983, 16mm, colour, sound, 35 minutes.
First Public Screening: Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Vienna, 25 January 1983.

Wingseed *
1985, 35mm, colour, sound, 15 minutes.
Cast: Arno Gutleb. Filmed in Greece (Anavvysos, Lyssaraia).
A seed that floats in the air, a whirligig, a love charm. This magnificent landscape, both hot and dry, is far from sterile; rather, the heat and dryness produce a distinct type of life, seen in the perfect forms of the wild grass and seed pods, the herds of goats as well as in the naked figure. The torso, in itself, and more, the image which it creates in this light. The sounds of the shepherd's signals and the flute's phrase are heard. And the goats' bells. Imagine the bell's clapper moving from side to side with the goat's movements like the quick side-to-side camera movements, which increase in pace and reach a vibrant ostinato. (Robert Beavers).
First Public Screening: Temenos Film Presentations, Lyssaraia, 7 September 1985.

The Hedge Theatre *
1986-90/2002, 35mm, colour, sound, 19 minutes.
Cast: Robert Beavers, Gregory Markopoulos.
Filmed in Italy (Rome, Brescia).
Some years after filming AMOR, I returned to Italy and found the source for a new film in the architecture of Borromini and in a grove of trees with empty birdcages. (A grove of trees, a rocolo, in which hunters would set out cages with decoys, called richiami, whose song attracted other birds.) The buoyant spaces of these cupolas, the sewing of a buttonhole, and the invisible bird hunt are all elements in the sustained dialogue of The Hedge Theatre. (Robert Beavers).
First Public Screening: London Film Festival, National Film Theatre, 17 November 2002.

The Stoas *
1991-97, 35mm, colour, sound, 22 minutes.
Cast: Robert Beavers.
Filmed in Greece (Athens, Gortynia).
The title refers to the colonnades that led to the shady groves of the ancient Lyceum, here remembered in shots of industrial arcades, bathed in golden morning light, as quietly empty of human figures as Atget's survey photos. The rest of the film presents luscious shots of a wooded stream and hazy glen, portrayed with the careful composition on 19th century landscape painting. An ineffable, unnameable immanence flows through the images of The Stoas, a kind of presence of the human soul expressed through the sympathetic absence of the human figure. (Ed Halter, New York Press).
First Public Screening: International Film Festival Rotterdam, 5 February 1999.

The Ground *
1993-2001, 35mm, colour, sound, 20 minutes.
Cast: Robert Beavers. Filmed in Greece (Island of Hydra).
What lives in the space between the stones, in the space cupped between my hand and my chest? Filmmaker/stonemason. A tower or ruin of rememberance. With each swing of the hammer I cut into the image and the sound rises from the chisel. A rhythm, marked by repetition and animated by variation; strokes of hammer and fist, resounding in dialogue. In this space which the film creates, emptiness gains a conour strong enough for the spectator to see more than the image - a space permitting vision in addition to sight. (Robert Beavers).
First Public Screening: International Film Festival Rotterdam, 30 January 2001.

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