Double Vision: The Cinema of Robert Beavers

Rutkoff (The Irresponsible Magician), a humanities professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, serves up an esoteric examination of avant-garde filmmaker Robert Beavers’s technique and oeuvre. Drawing on “a decade’s worth of conversations with the artist,” Rutkoff provides background on the inspiration and conceptual foundations behind the director’s abstract films. For instance, she notes that a gifted copy of John Ruskin’s 1851 architectural treatise The Stones of Venice inspired Beavers’s 1975 short Ruskin, whose black-and-white shots of Venetian buildings were styled after Ruskin’s line drawings. Rutkoff delves into Beavers’s inventive formal techniques, explaining his practice of using numerical patterns to guide his edits (for example, a 2/4/4/2 pattern would mean using two frames from roll A, then four from roll B, then back to A, etc.). An extensive selection of stills from Beavers’s films offers a rare look at his talent for composition (Beavers has refused permission to publicly screen his works for decades). Unfortunately, Rutkoff’s opaque prose does little to demystify Beavers’s films, as when she contends that “rigorous semiotic shake-up catalyzed by material/processual self-reflexivity interfaces with intimate soul-balancing priorities” in his movies. This will primarily be of interest to film scholars and industry insiders curious about the technical details behind Beavers’s filmmaking. Photos. (Aug.)