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From the Notebook of... (Robert Beavers, 1971/1998)
🕑 Added 2018-10-23 04:56:08 +0000 UTC
First, a word about the double date. Many of Beavers' films have two dates of completion, because he finished shooting the footage during the first listed year, and completed the editing (or in some cases, re-editing) in the second. As a result, many if not most of Beavers' films were unavailable throughout the 70s and 80s.
From the Notebook of... is unlike any of the other Beavers films I've seen, in that it could be said to approximate this filmmaker's version of a "structural" film. Now, if you are at all familiar with Beavers' work, with its classical Greek and Italian influences and generally Old World ambiance, you will immediately bristle at the idea of a structural Beavers film. His sensibility is altogether too Romantic. A film like Work Done, after all, focuses on the gestures of men cutting stone with a hammer and chisel; The Hedge Theater features repeated images of a bare-chested man cupping his hand against his chest as though he were offering you his very heart.
Notebook begins with shots of pigeons flying over stone buildings, the flapping of their wings amplified. Soon, the screen is split by a pink divider that covers first one, then the other half of the image. We soon learn that these are the pages of Beavers' notebook, and in time, they will feature perfect cursive handwriting with short statements about the filmmaking process. Throughout the entirety of From the Notebook of...'s 45 minute running time, Beavers will alternate specific key images -- rooftops out the window, an unwinding camera, the sky, himself seated at his desk, a naked man, himself together with Gregory Markopoulos -- with pages from the notebook and various colored filters and mattes.
Meanwhile, sound design is an incredibly important part of this film. Beavers combines unlike sounds and images to generate "sync events," such as the flapping of birds' wings and the flickering of the camera shutter. Movement in light generates as much sound as the actual motion of objects, which is best typified by the flipping noise of pages back and forth across the frame.
If you have ever marveled at the precision of Beavers' films, especially their editing, there is something both breathtaking and jarring about Notebook, because it is like a self-reflexive "peek behind the curtain," a film that enacts all of Beavers' classical rigor but interrupts it with statements and even diagrams, to tell you how he thinks about his own work and how you might best think about it too. More than once, I thought about Robert Bresson's Notes on Cinematography, and what it would be like if Bresson actually "filmed" the book, while building a feature around it.
At the same time, quite often the shots of the notebooks are too quick to read, or overexposed, or the diagrams are shot too small to make heads or tails of. So there's a very strong sense in which Beavers is alluding to explanation much more than offering it. That is, he is showing you his world as he sees it, and that includes his pre- and post-film thinking processes, which are not supposed to explain the images and sounds so much as settle alongside them, as equals.
You can watch a fairly decent copy of From the Notebook of... on YouTube.
