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 itinerant self-imposed exile 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—pulls back the curtain to shed light on this deeply original underground figure and reveal the way Beavers’s films explore non-optical 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 lens to explore the poetic feedback loop between Beavers’s filmmaking and writing practices, examine how his life-story and art are both inextricably bound to and distinct from Markopoulos’s, 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 definitive account of this outsider artist stands as the most detailed, knowledgeable, and fully researched to date. Double Vision celebrates Beavers’s singular vision and promises to make him known to all those who have not yet encountered his work.

Rebekah Rutkoff is Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. A New York–based writer, she 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.

Prologue: The Prismatic Way

1. Early Sequences
2. Love Stories
3. Economies of Abstraction
Boy and Man
A Note
4. Ruskin, A Reading
5. Object Relations and Solid Forms
Triptych / Ice Block
Love Forms / Bank Notes
6. Stoas and Vases
7. New Leaf