Description
Double Vision: The Cinema of Robert Beavers
Author/Editor: Rebekah Rutkoff
CONTENTS
A lavishly illustrated inside account of one of avant-garde film’s most original outsiders, the filmmaker Robert Beavers.
Double Vision is a beautifully written work of biography and criticism that tells the inside story of Robert Beavers (b. 1949), a major American avant-garde filmmaker. Until now, Beavers’s dramatic life of itinerancy and resistance to commercial circulation has obscured his recognition as one of today’s most significant living filmmakers. In Double Vision, Rebekah Rutkoff, the first scholar to have full access to Beavers’s writing archive, sheds light on this deeply original underground figure and reveals the way Beavers’ films explore non-optical seeing—awareness itself—as an outcome of cinematic sight.
Born in the United States, Robert Beavers moved to Europe as a teenager with his partner, filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos, in 1967. Over the following decades, he developed a unique cinematic language that fuses spiritual aims with cultural critique and braids domestic and erotic self-portraiture with studies of colored light and his own filmmaking process. Rutkoff uses the concept of “double vision” as a means to explore the poetic feedback loop between Beavers’s filmmaking and writing practices, examine his life story and art next to those of Markopoulos and demonstrate how his films defy standard art historical genealogies and binary thought. Richly illustrated with compelling film stills, many never before seen, Rutkoff’s account of the outsider artist stands as the most detailed, knowledgeable, and fully researched to date. Double Vision celebrates Beavers’s singular achievement and promises to make him known to all those who have not yet encountered his work.
There is nothing remotely comparable to Rebekah Rutkoff’s remarkable account of Robert Beavers’s life and art. As well as establishing its subject in the pantheon of essential film artists, Double Vision is so brilliantly composed that it will stand as a classic of film scholarship, and indeed a literary event in its own right. (David E. James, Professor Emeritus, USC School of Cinematic Arts; author of Power Misses II: Cinema, Asian and Modern)
Rutkoff provides an eloquent and knowledgeable account of an extraordinary creative project. In exploring the work of Robert Beavers, she sets before the reader’s eyes some of the most fascinating achievements of cinema in our time. (Daniel Heller-Roazen, Arthur W. Marks 1919 Professor of Comparative Literature, Princeton University; author of Absentees: On Variously Missing Persons)
Rebekah Rutkoff is the author of The Irresponsible Magician: Essays and Fictions (Semiotext(e)) and the editor of a collection of essays by and about Robert Beavers. She is Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Hardcover
Publisher: The MIT Press
ISBN: 978-0-2620-4876-7
Dimensions: 7 x 9 inches
336 pp.