Robert Beavers

November 2008
The Aurora Festival in Norwich UK (in the East of England) is devoted to showing artists’ film/experimental film. The 2008 Festival was held under the title ‘The Infinite Measure’ and was spread over five days, 12 to 16 November. Not a large event but not a negligible one either, and each day was packed with screenings in Cinema City, while other installations, performances and special events took place throughout the city.
 
There were four featured film-makers this year: Robert Beavers (American), Barbara Sternberg (Canadian), Michael Robinson (American) And Patrick Bokanowski (French). Their programmes gave the opportunity not only to engage with their work in some depth, but also to listen to and converse with them. The highlight for me were the two Beavers programmes (showing Early Monthly Segments, AMOR, The Ground, Ruskin, Pitcher of Coloured Light) and the study day he ran for five hours on Saturday 15 November in which he introduced the work of other film-makers to which he was sympathetic, and shed illumination not just on them (Francois Boué, Bruce Baillie, Ute Aurand, Helga Fanderl, Gregory Markopoulos, and Jeannette Muñoz) but also on his own methods and ideas. I took copious notes and have written them up here [5-page pdf].
 
 
Here’s a picture of two of the film-makers, Barbara Sternberg and Robert Beavers, with proof that they are in Norwich because the building they are standing in front of is St Andrew’s church displaying the Norfolk/Suffolk speciality of flushwork, i.e. knapped flint set in dressed stone.
 
 
 
And here are the posters outside Cinema City: the self-effacing Aurora poster is on the left. Easy Virtue is not the title of an experimental film, and I can make nothing of it. But Quantum of Solace has potential, you feel, maybe as a title for a Hollis Frampton film? Except that the film I imagine Frampton making called Quantum of Solace is not the film that has actually been made under that title.
 
Film-makers and audiences in Norwich owe a debt of thanks to Adam Pugh and Kelly Ling for organising Aurora.
 
[Last year, one of the featured film-makers was Robert Breer. My essay on his lively presentation can be found here.]