The Suppliant

A portrait of a recently vacated home, the film evokes both memory and the lingering presence of past inhabitants. Through precise, enigmatic sound–image construction, Beavers crafts an intimate meditation on art, existence, and the search for meaning.

A meditation on landscape and desire, the film juxtaposes arid terrain, wild grasses, and herds of goats with the naked figure of a torso in shifting light. Shepherd’s calls, flute phrases, and the rhythm of bells echo Beavers’ quick, side-to-side camera movements, building to a vibrant visual and sonic ostinato.

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.’

Shot in Florence and the Alps, the film contemplates traditional European labor—ice vaults, bookbinding, cooking—while largely omitting human protagonists. Through textural equivalences between workshop and field, book and forest, stone and mountain, Beavers reflects on the resonance of craft and place.

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.

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.

Beavers revisits locations in Berlin first filmed in Diminished Frame (1970), alongside sites in Massachusetts, to reflect on how lived places shape vision and memory. Moving between past and present, the film becomes a meditation on perception, time, and the persistence of personal landscapes.

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.

Conceived as a gift for Cécile Staehelin after the death of her husband Dieter, the film reflects on music as both memory and philosophy. Dieter speaks about sound as harmony, proportion, and inner life, while he and Cécile are seen performing Bohuslav Martinů’s Arabesque. Beavers punctuates their playing with luminous passages of white light, shaping an intimate portrait of friendship, loss, and the transcendent reach of music.

Filmed in his mother’s house and garden, Beavers traces shifting shadows across seasons, capturing a blend of solitude and peace. Light and shadow become passages to memory, as the film transforms walls and spaces into reflections of place, time, and inner voice.

Distilled in 1996 from an earlier 50-minute trilogy, this film was shot in Greece and Austria and structured around two recurring intertitles, “He said” and “he said.” Each introduces delicate studies of light and place—hotel interiors, cafés, hillsides, storefronts, and street life—framed in parallel variations. The title invokes Apollo as savior and healer.

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.

Shot in Rome and Salzburg’s natural theatre, the film uses cutting and sewing as metaphors for love, separation, and the craft of montage. Cloth being trimmed, hands clapping, and tools striking accompany images of tailoring, architectural restoration, and Beavers himself in a new suit, linking gesture and sound to the editing process.

Interweaving stonework and filmmaking, Beavers evokes memory through hammer strokes and chisel sounds that shape both image and rhythm. In this dialogue of repetition and variation, the film carves out a space where emptiness itself gains form, allowing vision beyond sight.

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.

Late afternoon quiet and a silent figure seated on a bench in Nafplion; the historic figures of Kolokotronis and Kapodistrias; plus the old factories and machinery, warehouses and train lines that are part of a Piraeus, now disappearing.