Robert Beavers

Visual montage of a suit being made followed by a man wearing the suit making hand movements.

From the Notebook of was shot in Florence and takes as point of departure Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks and Paul Valéry's essay on da Vinci's process. 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 suggest his investigating gaze (Henriette Huldisch, Whitney Museum of American Art)

A man pounding on his chest, a man breaking rocks, deserted mountain ruins.The rhythmic sounds tie these images together.

An intimate film inspired by the Baroque architecture and stone carvings of Francesco Borromini and St. Martin and the Beggar, a painting by the Sienese painter Il Sassetta. Beavers' montage contrasts the sensuous softness of winter light with the lush green growth brought by spring rains. Each shot and each source of sound is steeped in meaning and placed within the film's structure with exacting skill to build a poetic relationship between image and sound. (themoviedb)

"Ruskin visits the sites of (art critic) John Ruskin's work: London, the Alps and, above all, Venice, where the camera's attention to masonry and the interaction of architecture and water mimics the author's descriptive analysis of the 'stones' of the city. The sound of pages turning and the image of a book, Ruskin's Unto This Last, forcibly reminds us that a poet's perceptions and in this case his political economy, are preserved and reawakened through acts of reading and writin