“… The shadows play an essential part in the mixture of loneliness and peace that exists here. The seasons move from the garden into the house, projecting rich diagonals in the early morning or late afternoon. Each shadow is a subtle balance of stillness and movement; it shows the vital instability of space. Its special quality opens a passage to the subjective; a voice within the film speaks to memory. The walls are screens through which I pass to the inhabited privacy. We experience a place through the perspective of where we come from and hear another’s voice through our own acoustic. The sense of place is never separate from the moment.” (RB)

“Late afternoon quiet and a silent figure seated on a bench; the old factories and machinery, warehouses and train lines are part of a Greece, now disappearing.” (RB)

“The life of a sound should inhabit the film frame,” Robert Beavers wrote in one of his numerous notebooks. Of all the astonishing films in his singular body of work, Listening to the Space in My Room is perhaps the film that manifests the life of sounds in the most evocative way. Between 2002 and 2012, Beavers lived on the ground floor of an old house in Zumikon, a quiet Zurich municipality, just underneath his landlords, Cécile and Dieter Staehelin, a retired doctor and a cellist, respectively. This film is a lyrical ode to the Staehelins and to life in this long-shared place, as well as an exploration of resonance as an acoustic signature of a space, connecting sound and space through the element of time. Throughout the film, Beavers articulates zones of permeability — between floors, between garden and interior, between subjectivities. Cello tones and birdsong join the crackle of creaking floorboards and the muffled sounds of footsteps and conversation, extending the meditation on the acoustics of shared inhabited space. “At about midpoint in the film we hear the sound of rain first introduced with black leader and then accompanying a pan as the rain falls on the garden and elephant leaves. This rich and complex sound- scape breathes with life and exudes a quality which opens the soundtrack to the outside — to that which is traditionally outside of music (noise) and to the world beyond the visual space of film.” (Luke Fowler)

“Imagine someone boiling down all the impermanent sensations, routines, memories, and emotions that make a home a home into an intensely flavorful reduction, and you begin to understand Beavers’ stunning film. He and his housemates are crystallized at work: the camera sways with the hands of an older man bowing his cello; observes an older woman tending her garden from inside the darkened house; mirrors Beavers himself examining individual frames of film to stage his somatic cuts. The intricately interlaid tracks of sound and image do not abide any standard measure of continuity, and yet there’s something immediately comprehensible in this exquisitely tuned song of the body in space.” (Max Goldberg)

““Der Klang, die Welt…” was filmed in the same site as Listening to the Space in My Room, but now we hear Dieter Staehelin speaking about the place of music in his life, and we join him and Cécile Staehelin playing an Arabesque by Bohuslav Martinů. While they play, I turned the lens at certain moments to white, an open aperture.” (RB)