Double Vision

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.