Double Vision: The Cinema of Robert Beavers

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’s films explore nonoptical seeing—awareness itself—as an outcome of cinematic sight.

Born in the United States, 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.