Though the history of experimental film is rife with iconoclastic visionaries, Robert Beavers somehow remains one of its under-sung heroes. Together with his partner, Gregory Markopoulos (1928–92), Beavers developed an approach to cinema defined by its singular and uncompromising rigor, yielding a body of work celebrated as much for its poetic beauty as its complex formal investigation of the filmmaking apparatus. While continuing to make films to this day, Beavers also helms the Temenos, an open-air theatre in Lyssaraia Greece, dedicated to screenings of Markopoulos’s sprawling magnum opus, Eniaios (1947–91).
From September 26 to 29, 2024, New York’s Anthology Film Archives has programmed a retrospective of Beavers’s films, giving American audiences a rare opportunity to see his work. In this exclusive excerpt from the recently released Double Vision: The Cinema of Robert Beavers (MIT Press, 2024), author Rebekah Rutkoff delves into the making of Ruskin (1975/1997), Beavers’s little-known cinematic invocation of the English art critic’s life and writings.
Excerpted from Double Vision: The Cinema of Robert Beavers by Rebekah Rutkoff. Reprinted with permission from The MIT Press. Copyright 2024.
“When the (beautiful) object is a book, what exists and what no longer exists?” – Jacques Derrida 1
“Actor’s incident: separate act from word.” – Robert Beavers, notes for Ruskin
Christmas Gift
On December 25, 1973, Beavers made notes while looking at a Christmas card standing on a table in Venice. From his observational position, it became an architectural curiosity. The front and back leaves appeared to merge into one plane; their top edges formed one continuous line. And while the angle of the card rendered the image on its front a trapezoid, the internal pictorial perspective of that image remained in place. Beavers was by then several months into making notes for Ruskin (1975/1997), the last of a series of four films shot in Italy and Switzerland (after From the Notebook of . . ., The Painting, and Work Done).
Three years earlier, in 1972, on a trip back to Weymouth from Europe, Beavers discovered an old gift from his childhood neighbor Mrs. Hodges: the Victorian artist/critic/naturalist/social reformer John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice (1851–1853)—three volumes with colored plates, a treatise on the history of Venetian architecture across the Byzantine, Gothic, and Renaissance eras. Reading it produced the certainty of desire— “I want to go to Venice and make a film.” He relocated to Venice with Markopoulos the following year and completed the fugal Ruskin in 1975.
Ruskin was thirteen when he received an important gift: Samuel Rogers’s Italy (1830) with watercolor vignettes by J. M. W. Turner. A year later Ruskin saw three of Turner’s oil paintings at the Royal Academy and, at twenty-four, he began to write a defense of Turner’s atmospheric landscapes—a simultaneous assault on the one-noted art establishment taste for Old Master mimeticism—that became the five-volume Modern Painters (1843–1860). Beavers was also twenty-four when he began to make Ruskin. Images of a small book recur in the film; it is raised and lowered against a table edge under Beavers’s palm: vertical, horizontal. Shot in black-and-white, without a visible title, the book remains closed.
Ruskin opens amid the marshes of Torcello—the island that preceded Venice in its rise and fall as an economic and trading center—before arriving in central Venice. The buildings (Palazzo Ducale, Santa Maria Mater Domini, Basilico San Marco, San Giovanni Evangelista) and architectural details (windows, arches, columns, gargoyles) that Ruskin drew, painted, and wrote about in The Stones of Venice join material shot in the Alps and London (also sites of Ruskin’s writing). These exterior locations—all shot in both color and black-and-white—engage in both compositional (intra-image) and rhythmic (across the film) play with the book and other signifiers of interiority and process: shaped mattes that block, expand, and shrink; glimpses of apparatus (compendium, matte holder, lens); graphic wipes. The visual exchange is propelled by discrete sound events (moving water, turning pages, flap-ping bird wings), grounded by ambient multiplicity (traffic, church bells, footsteps, voices, rattling metal, birdsong), and punctuated by two sounds associated with the book—a thud of contact and a held organ note.
Beavers shot the color material at three different times—early morning, midday, late afternoon—to catch the sun’s turn, but used only one stock.2 “I left it to chance; I selected a film stock meant for light between 10:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. but shot before and after that period.” The early shots are tinged with orange; late-day footage has a silvery tone. As in Diminished Frame (1970/2001), alternation between black-and-white and color signifies transit between past and present.
Ruskin’s own line drawings in The Stones of Venice prompted Beavers’s use of black-and-white film; nineteenth-century image-making was also on his mind: “Ruskin was an early photographer . . . so I thought I would try to relate the quality of the filming to the period in which he was in Venice and to that period of photography,” he said.3 A stereoscopic beat is engrained in the film’s rhythm: Some Ruskin images briskly drop into and exit the frame from above or below—Beavers shot them while turning his lens turret (changing from one lens to another). “It creates a rotating, like slides being changed,” Beavers said.4 As this vertical shot transit meets the graphic horizontal emphasis in the film, Ruskin’s spatial articulations fluctuate and surprise. Horizontal-vertical dynamism, acted out between the film-maker’s hand and Ruskin’s book, is part of the film’s architectural metabolism.5
In his second Ruskin note, from April 1973, Beavers copied lines from Gustave Flaubert’s 1849 notebook—a recollection of coping with pending separations before his departure for Egypt: “The next two days I lived lavishly—huge dinners, quantities of wine, whores. The senses are not far removed from the emotions, and my poor tortured nerves needed a little relaxation.”6 Identifying not with Flaubert’s method but with his dilemma, Beavers added, “The artist—keeping alive sense and emotion—his means: extravagance.” In reading da Vinci and Ruskin, Beavers found his own means of keeping alive. “Somehow my connection to these figures allowed me to make the films. I want[ed] to show my enthusiasm for them. This is the point.” As with From the Notebook of . . ., Beavers’s aim was neither biography nor emulation. “How to do this without using these wonderful inspiring figures as a crutch or imposing upon their own work? You could say they’re, in a way, ‘homages.’”
To run on enthusiasm is to allow a divine impulse to catalyze action (enthous— “possessed by a god [theos], inspired”). Beavers asked Jonas Mekas to purchase a copy of Still Light; he used the $1,400 payment (the first of two) from Anthology Film Archives to rent a room at the Albergo San Marco in Venice for several months. Keeping alive outside the energizing machinations of capital was one of Ruskin’s primary concerns; The Stones of Venice, ostensibly an architectural encyclopedia, is a warning about the losses of life endemic to modernization. The imperfections, variations, and handmade “savagery” of the Gothic style Ruskin champions a resigns of a craftsperson free to bring mind to hand in the creation of communal art forms and the spiritual health of his medieval society. Ruskin bundles the regularizing aesthetic ruin wrought by the Renaissance with spiritual collapse and the decline of the Venetian Empire—and delivers the trifecta back to his own industrializing British Empire: a warning about damages to hand, heart, and mind in a mercantile economy where men are “divided . . . into small fragments and crumbs of life.”7 The Stones of Venice is iconoclastic, a literary reading of forms of truth inscribed on architectural surfaces.
I asked Beavers what struck him so forcefully about Ruskin. “His sentences,” he said. Informed by deep ensconcement in romantic poetry and the Bible, Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice prose is succinct in aphoristic certainty— “To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality”8—and circuitous in hyper-descriptive direct address as he seeks to make certain his reader is also seeing:
And now come with me, for I have kept you too long from your gondola: come with me, on an autumnal morning, through the dark gates of Padua, and let us take the broad road leading towards the East. . . We have but walked some two hundred yards when we come to a low wharf or quay at the extremity of a canal, with long steps on each side down to the water, which latter we fancy for an instant has become black with stagnation; another glance undeceives us, —it is covered with the black boats of Venice. We enter one of them, rather to try if they be real boats or not, than with any definite purpose, and glide away; at first feeling as if the water were yielding continually beneath the boat and letting her sink into soft vacancy.9
Beavers selected eighteen “key fragments [from The Stones of Venice] that [he] wanted the spectator to be aware of.”10 After the Shakespearean actor John Gielgud turned him down (Beavers knocked on his London door), a young English writer recorded the excerpts as voiceover.11 Beavers shot in Venice, London, and Soglio, Switzerland, between October 1973 and March 1974. “Editing of ‘Ruskin’ completed,” he wrote in April. The film won the Maeght Foundation Prize at the Asolo Film Festival, in Venice, in May 1974.
But Beavers “wasn’t satisfied” with Ruskin’s voice as a legible, word-by-word element: “I thought [it] made less of the film,” he told Tony Pipolo.12 In July he began to work on a second iteration, producing an “appendix” or “coda” that approached voice indirectly: he shot his own hand flipping through the pages of an open book .“I still wanted Ruskin’s voice to be in the film, and the only way that I could do it was to go to the pages—the way that they move, the way that certain words stand out, and the way that they stopped moving always at certain points—and in the editing this gains the meaning of ‘seeing into reading’; it is both more direct and retains a clearer distance.”13
Beavers saw the coda as a “replacement” for the extracted Stones of Venice voiceover, but the pages belong to Ruskin’s Unto This Last, his 1860 diatribe against free-market capitalism. In 1997, when Beavers revised Ruskin into its third and final forty-five-minute form (the coda comprises the final fifth), he reconceptualized the organ note he had added to the second version as another “stand-in for Ruskin’s voice.” The organ volume increases gradually across the film. “Each time the organ sound is heard . . . it takes on a different meaning,” he said.14
NOTES
1. Jacques Derrida, “The Parergon,” in The Truth in Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 37.
2. While making Ruskin, Beavers, in his notes, imagined the camera lens, sun, and filmed objects rotating along separate but intersecting axes, together generating “the sphere of the film.” He placed himself inside these orbits to conduct structure and subject himself to chance.
3. Michael Guillén, “Winged Distance / Sightless Measure: Robert Beavers On . . . ,” The Evening Class, October 25, 2009, https://theeveningclass.blogspot.com/2009/10/winged-distance-sightless-measure_25.html.
4. In Ruskin, as soon as the second of two lenses “arrives” (via turret turn) on a single color shot, Beavers cuts immediately to a static black-and-white shot, producing a rhythmic contrast between churning color and black-and-white stillness.
5. The book is one of the volumes of The Stones of Venice.
6. Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour, ed. and trans. Francis Steegmuller (New York: Penguin, 1996), 21. Underline is Beavers’s.
7. John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, vol. 2 (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1853), 165.
8. Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, vol. 2, 171.
9. John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, vol. 1 (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1851), 344–346.
10. Tony Pipolo, “An Interview with Robert Beavers,” Millennium Film Journal, no. 32/33 (Fall 1998): 16.
11. The young man attended a screening of Markopoulos’s films at Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol; Markopoulos recommended him to Beavers as his Ruskin reader.
12. Pipolo, “An Interview with Robert Beavers,” 16. Pipolo interviewed Beavers about his life and films in November 1997 and February and March 1998.
13. Pipolo, “An Interview with Robert Beavers,” 16.
14. Pipolo, “An Interview with Robert Beavers,” 24.
