The Cinematheque

“The Ground is not to be missed … [The film] makes a parallel between filmmaking and stone cutting: both depend not only on chiselling pieces so that they fit together, but also in leaving space enough for something to enter or take flight.”

Amy Taubin, Village Voice

These final works in Robert Beavers’s defining film cycle My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure present something both tactile and elusive. Each studies and compares images of stone-based architecture—whether scaled to immensity or human height—with an awareness of the way their geometry and fixity lend themselves as containers for organic growth. All of them represent Beavers at his most dramatically motivated, as he combines the rich sensations of the external world—hard percussive sound and soft blanketing light—with the striking gestures of his structuring presence. As his overarching title suggests, the use of one’s hands is a generative, self-reflexive act for a filmmaker, and not just metaphor alone. The cycle’s culmination, The Ground, Beavers’s first film after the death of Gregory Markopoulos, offers an emotional and physical evocation of hollowness, in all its exposed pain and open potential.

The Hedge Theater
Italy 1986–90, 2002
Robert Beavers
19 min. 16mm

The Stoas
Greece 1991–97
Robert Beavers
22 min. 35mm

The Ground
Greece 1993–2001
Robert Beavers
20 min. 16mm