My Hand Outstretched: Programme 1

Date: 23 February 2007 | Season: Robert Beavers 2007

MY HAND OUTSTRETCHED: PROGRAMME 1
Friday 23 February 2007, at 7pm
London Tate Modern

Robert Beavers, Early Monthly Segments, 1968-70/2002, 35mm, colour, silent, 33 min
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)

Robert Beavers, Winged Dialogue, 1967/2000
Robert Beavers, Plan of Brussels, 1968/2000, 16mm, colour, sound, 21 min
Winged Dialogue details with growing clarity the desperate beauty and sexuality of the body animated by its 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, Beavers filmed himself in a hotel room, both at his work desk and lying naked on the bed, while in rapid rhythmic cutting, and sometimes in superimposition, the phantasmagoria of people he met in Brussels and images from the streets flood his mind. (P. Adams Sitney, Film Comment)

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