Gregory Markopoulos (1928-1992) "vrhovni erotski pjesnik" američke filmske avangarde i tvorac vizualnih uzoraka koje je zvao "slike-misli" (thought-images) desetljećima je stvarao monumentalni film Eniaios (80 sati dug, podijeljen u 22 ciklusa), no nije doživio njegovu finalizaciju i projekciju, koja se trebala održati u Grčkoj, u Temenosu. Njegov prijatelj Robert Beavers uspio je dosad osposobiti šest ciklusa (10 sati filma) koji su sad dostupni za gledanje. Primjer filmova koji rastu uvis sve dok ne dodirnu samo dno postojanja.
Ovo se od Markopoulosa može naći na YouTubeu:
MOMI Screens Markopoulos Rarity Eniaios: Cycle Five
Neighborhood tavernas notwithstanding, the Museum of the Moving Image is a long way from southern Greece. Still, all four and a half hours of Eniaios: Cycle Five will be screening, introduced by a scholarly panel discussion, this Saturday in the museum’s new stadium-style theater. An imposing film object, it begins as a stately flicker, alternating brief passages of opaque blackness with moments of white light, gradually introducing split-second images of stone walls, ruins, and rural landscapes. These images from darkness are repeated at regular, if changing, intervals. The effect is hypnotic; it’s as if a world is being conjured into existence. The cycle’s second half—incorporating material from, among other films, The Illiac Passion, Markopoulos’s mid-’60s reworking of the Prometheus story—is less elemental, closer to narrative. There’s even a hint of a love story, delivered in one-second increments.
Like The Illiac Passion, many of Marko-poulos’s films were alternate myths; Eniaios proposes an alternative form of cinema. Overtly predicated on the 24-frames-per-second rhythm of the motion-picture projector, it merges physiological with aesthetic response. White light is dazzling shock. Images fly at the viewer as if from a slingshot. Each is a fleeting epiphany that turns into a percussive illusory after-image before you can even grasp it. Rarefied yet visceral, at once austere and sensuous, Eniaios is pure cinema, a monument—unyielding and elusive—to fleeting sensation.
More thoughts from Fred Camper:
"The film was the first section of 'Eniaios' that I have seen. I thought I had known what to expect from the Markopoulos films I have seen that seem related, like 'Gammelion'. But no. Great as 'Gammelion' is, 'Eniaios' is something else. It is as great a film as any I know. There are ways in which it is greater than any I know, in its austere perfection, its demands on the viewer, and the transcendent beauties it wrests from rhythms of black and white, the briefest of images, and the many amazing moments when the images last long enough to show movement. The whole has an almost eternal quality, feeling disconnected from any particular time or from any particular culture. The times when my attention wandered during a few seconds of black, the film would suddenly feel 'destroyed,' in a way that doesn't happen in other great films, which I took to reveal that every frame is perfectly essential.
It is an incredible scandal that this work is not recognized as the towering masterpiece that it is, and that Robert Beavers has to seek funds to continue to print it."
It is an incredible scandal that this work is not recognized as the towering masterpiece that it is, and that Robert Beavers has to seek funds to continue to print it."
Thoughts from Kyle Canterbury:
[on CYCLE II]
"However, 24 days after Eniaios II I still am no closer to attempting to transpose the experience into verbal matter. Instead it's increasingly clear that it entirely resists any of the metaphorical turns language is so prone towards. It is less like anything else than any film I know. In it the medium has metamorphosed into a form that accounts for every part within itself, allows for the utmost flexibility and range of meaning, and needless to say is completely immune to any summarization. Though descriptions of the style on paper might conceivably make the film seem to involve a certain level of complex monotony, in actuality it doesn't have a fixed mode of expression; its available means (and it seems to unlock the secret capabilities of the medium) open endless arrays of possibilities. It's constantly doing something new. This was as much true of Genius, which was shown in its Eniaios-version, occupying the middle three reels of order III, in the second program. In it 'portraits' of three people combine, dominated by surreal hyacinthine and amaranthine colors, into 'alchemic' bonds (Fred's word), but in a way that destroys verbal suggestiveness. One's mind may wander to ponder for a moment the interconnectedness of the images, but the film doesn't, always building what one is tempted to say are architectural models, that release a new form of thinking that at its roots is inseparable from cinema. Though cycle III has a sculptural element, and does something the other two didn't which is shift the images horizontally and vertically, and it's inevitable to think of the film as an immense architecture, such terms are more erroneous than in even most great art.
The beginning of Eniaios II, containing the opening of Ming Green, felt like a world being built from the ground up. Its scatterings later of Mark Turbyfill, Sorrows, portraits from Galaxie, could seem an overture in which all its fragments are intersecting, clustering, dispersing. After two hours The Illiac Passion section begins with short frames of black with wisps of flame and what I can only describe as a cosmic journey taking place on the Brooklyn Bridge. Near its end, the strangest of elliptic fragments of stone and ground in half-light. Again, any kind of metaphor is especially deficient here. A friend said he kept trying to force the film into a birth-memory experience or even a galactic birth and when he let that go is when the film began to explode.
Though by all accounts it must be the most complete film (and certainly how these cycles feel: wholes part of a whole), there's a curious tension to its parts. A cycle is variegated with them: 'movements' or voices in constellation. Worlds in and of themselves, in their expanding scope, they feel on the precipice of breaking off from the others.
It was fascinating to see a program with three sixties works and a part of Eniaios: compared to its all-over totality, they felt fired by an almost nervous impulse, an instability altogether absent in the final work. The way his images have of branching out in the mind or multiplying into an endless series like aligned rows of transforming windows reaching towards infinity, which sometimes I'm tempted to think of almost as a 'raw material' of his films, in Eniaios is something even more inbound, vast and devastating. But I completely love all the others I've seen and, though it seems ridiculous, they are so 'different' in the deepest sense that they lose none of their magic in the context of the later beast."
The beginning of Eniaios II, containing the opening of Ming Green, felt like a world being built from the ground up. Its scatterings later of Mark Turbyfill, Sorrows, portraits from Galaxie, could seem an overture in which all its fragments are intersecting, clustering, dispersing. After two hours The Illiac Passion section begins with short frames of black with wisps of flame and what I can only describe as a cosmic journey taking place on the Brooklyn Bridge. Near its end, the strangest of elliptic fragments of stone and ground in half-light. Again, any kind of metaphor is especially deficient here. A friend said he kept trying to force the film into a birth-memory experience or even a galactic birth and when he let that go is when the film began to explode.
Though by all accounts it must be the most complete film (and certainly how these cycles feel: wholes part of a whole), there's a curious tension to its parts. A cycle is variegated with them: 'movements' or voices in constellation. Worlds in and of themselves, in their expanding scope, they feel on the precipice of breaking off from the others.
It was fascinating to see a program with three sixties works and a part of Eniaios: compared to its all-over totality, they felt fired by an almost nervous impulse, an instability altogether absent in the final work. The way his images have of branching out in the mind or multiplying into an endless series like aligned rows of transforming windows reaching towards infinity, which sometimes I'm tempted to think of almost as a 'raw material' of his films, in Eniaios is something even more inbound, vast and devastating. But I completely love all the others I've seen and, though it seems ridiculous, they are so 'different' in the deepest sense that they lose none of their magic in the context of the later beast."
[on CYCLE V]
"Now the film. Where to begin.... Eniaios has a religious weight to it. I hope "religious" isn't misleading. But every moment is made of such quiet intensity, each second has the feeling of immensity, the same immensity encompassing the whole project, with the same conviction spread over every frame; with its glorious tapestry of pure black and white frames holding it all together, and which throughout the entire 4.5 hour length of the cycle never ceased to feel _in the process_ of being built and yet fully made all at once, felt as if it were literally the Law. The images, though they flash before you in tiny bursts, are never divorced from the cosmic suggestiveness they contain. Because of the waves of white and black separating each image, and also each image from itself since it is repeated, each kind of has a lifespan. And that along with the very brevity in which we glimpse them creates a ripple of transience within this larger sense of the infinite. It attains a Zen-like emptiness. The movement is always, as in even his earlier films, away from matter.
The silence of Eniaios is very particular. Whereas most avant-garde films are silent in order to heighten the visual music of light, color and darkness, the silence of the Markopoulos results almost as if from purging the world of all non-imagery. The effect achieved in images is a little like what Beckett does with sounds actually. It is silence closely related to the reader's silence, to stillness, some painting.
I had only seen "Swain," "Himself as Herself," "Sorrows," and the early trilogy before this. "Sorrows" was clearly as great as any other film I'd ever seen -- I probably would have called it my favorite, or tied it with Straub-Huillet's "Der Tod des Empedokles."
This is far beyond that. In some ways it seems a replacement of all cinema. It's made as if no films had ever been made before. It's well into it that this cycle has its first discernible movement within an image. When I saw it it was if it were the first moving image ever. But really the impact of all the moments which make it up is like that one. The film strings them together like beads into a series of revelations.
I have to echo Fred in saying how unfortunate it is that there hasn't been more recognition and support for Markopoulos's work and obviously Eniaios in particular. Someone on the panel said this has to be the most ambitious film ever made, bar none. It feels miraculous that it even exists."
The silence of Eniaios is very particular. Whereas most avant-garde films are silent in order to heighten the visual music of light, color and darkness, the silence of the Markopoulos results almost as if from purging the world of all non-imagery. The effect achieved in images is a little like what Beckett does with sounds actually. It is silence closely related to the reader's silence, to stillness, some painting.
I had only seen "Swain," "Himself as Herself," "Sorrows," and the early trilogy before this. "Sorrows" was clearly as great as any other film I'd ever seen -- I probably would have called it my favorite, or tied it with Straub-Huillet's "Der Tod des Empedokles."
This is far beyond that. In some ways it seems a replacement of all cinema. It's made as if no films had ever been made before. It's well into it that this cycle has its first discernible movement within an image. When I saw it it was if it were the first moving image ever. But really the impact of all the moments which make it up is like that one. The film strings them together like beads into a series of revelations.
I have to echo Fred in saying how unfortunate it is that there hasn't been more recognition and support for Markopoulos's work and obviously Eniaios in particular. Someone on the panel said this has to be the most ambitious film ever made, bar none. It feels miraculous that it even exists."
Silent Nights by Michael Wang
Left: Robert Beavers (at far left) and guests at Temenos. Right: The guests walking to the site of the screening. (Photos: Michael Wang)
IT IS DIFFICULT to separate the form of Gregory Markopoulos’s Eniaios, his eighty-hour magnum opus, from his idiosyncratic biography. At the vanguard of the American experimental film scene in the 1950s and ’60s, Markopoulos emigrated to Europe in 1967 and withdrew his films from circulation. Two weekends ago, and sixteen years after Markopoulos’s death in 1992, the second installment of the film, cycles three through five of the twenty-two-cycle work, was projected, for the first time, at the site outside his ancestral village of Lyssaraia in the Peloponnese specified by him as the only suitable location for the viewing of the work—what he called the Temenos, after the classical term for a sacred space delimited from the everyday.
Nearly two hundred film pilgrims (filmmakers, film buffs, curators, critics, and scholars) arrived on three consecutive evenings from the nearby village of Loutra, following a curving dirt donkey path to the site as the sun set behind the mountains of Arcadia. There they discovered Markopoulos’s cinematic vision radically altered from that of his early years. Eniaios, whose title indicates both the “singularity” and the “uniqueness” of the film, reedits many of Markopoulos’s early films around his conception of the single frame as the basic filmic unit. While many of the original films included a sound track, the whir of the projector and the occasional insect provided the only accompaniment here. Reduced to lengths of a few seconds or even a single frame, cinematic fragments extracted from complete films—some of which, never having been printed, were literally respliced, their previous incarnations discarded—present the filmmaker’s oeuvre as a ruin or as an incomplete archive.
The Temenos site, an expanse of trimmed grass mowed, gratis, by a local resident, mysteriously sustains a cooler microclimate than its surroundings, and many viewers came equipped with blankets and even sleeping bags. While Markopoulos’s classical themes always looked toward his Hellenic roots (we still catch a glimpse of Taylor Mead, as Prometheus’s avian tormenter, scaling the rocks of a Long Island beach), his later imagery, of ancient, Roman, and Byzantine monuments, aligns—as does the screening site—with his “homecoming.” (Markopoulos was born to immigrant parents in Toledo, Ohio.) Honoring Markopoulos as a local son, Lyssaraia donated the buses that shuttled the visitors to the outskirts of the town and back each night, and hosted an outdoor dinner on the evening before the screenings began.
Introducing the event after dinner, the filmmaker Robert Beavers, Markopoulos’s lifelong companion, assured us that the Temenos was “a gift.” In the months preceding the screenings, Beavers, with the help of a tiny cadre of organizers, had sought out economical accommodations and complimentary transportation for the assembled visitors—anyone who had joined the “Temenos 2008” Google group—and refused any notion of an entry fee or ticket. The restoration of the films and the organization of the event itself relies on donors and the occasional outside grant. The erratic time frame of the screenings (the last was in 2004) is determined, mostly, by the arrival of funds (it will cost around one million dollars to print and restore the film in its entirety). The one hundred titles—which Markopoulos did not live to see projected—have come unglued, requiring arduous reconstruction, a task accomplished by Beavers and a few dedicated filmmakers. Citing the difficulty in attracting interest from large archives, Beavers explained the necessity of “fanatical efforts.”
The initial reel of night one, a “dedication” to Herakles, makes the boldest use of entirely white or black frames, whose modulated rhythms point to the lyric and gestural potentials of the medium. The lengths of clear and black leader do not obey a strict structural program, but rather prepare the viewer for the epic scale of Eniaios and set up the dream space of the afterimage. Projected against the night sky, the black screen matched the dim blue glow of the Milky Way overhead, while the piercingly bright white frames extinguished the surrounding landscape and, when they preceded a fragmentary image (of the tumbled stones of the Pyre of Herakles), threatened to blot out their content entirely.
But Eniaios is not purely an experiment in erasure. After the minimal flashes of the dedication, we were presented with the cropped compositions of Gilbert and George, whose matching tweeds and stiff postures elicited giggles from the local children who had gathered at the edge of the field. I recall, especially, George Passmore raising a cigarette to his lips, a gesture shattered into several staccato sections through the introduction of black tape between fragmentary flashes of motion. The gesture is dissected, frozen, and repeatedly delayed. If, as Giorgio Agamben tells us, “in the cinema, a society that has lost its gestures seeks to reappropriate what it has lost while simultaneously recording that loss,” we might think of Markopoulos’s insistence on “film as film” as preoccupied with nothing other than this dual etiology/eulogy of the gesture.
| A Pilgrimage to the Peloponnese: Gregory Markopoulos, Eniaios and the Temenos Erika Balsom |
| Writing this, this glorious afternoon, without a penny to my name, I know, that the depth of the Markopoulos space will harbour a screen enveloping the film spectator of the future. – <![endif]> Gregory Markopoulos, 1972 |
We followed driving directions for four hours out of Athens. At first, it was easy: a large highway, transliterated signs. As we drove up into the mountains, things changed. At one turn the directions told us, ‘There will be a willow tree, yellow telephone booth and small church/votive stand in front of you.’ Indeed, there was. We managed to make it to our guesthouse in the village of Rafti. That evening, we were treated to a delicious communal meal cooked by the women of Lyssaraia, a neighbouring village.
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June 29–July 1, 2012, marked the third set of screenings of Gregory Markopoulos’ Eniaios (1948–c.1990), an eighty-hour cycle of films left completed but unprinted upon the filmmaker’s death in 1992. The title of the cycle has a double meaning of ‘unity’ and ‘uniqueness’, both of which figure heavily in the project. During the last decade of his life, Markopoulos revisited his entire oeuvre, recutting selections into a single work divided into twenty-two orders. He decided that it would be only viewed at a single site, the Temenos, located in the hills of the Peloponnese, near the village of Lyssaraia, where his father was born. (1) Markopoulos and Robert Beavers, his longtime companion, had found their way to the site in the 1980s and held small, scarcely attended screenings of their work there. But unlike those films, and though Markopoulos would not live to see it, Eniaios was made specifically for exhibition in that venue. Beavers organised screenings of the first three orders of the cycle in
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1. The confinement of the cycle to the Temenos site is not absolute: the Temenos Foundation, led by Robert Beavers, has authorised infrequent screenings of cycles of the Eniaios in other locations, such as the Museum of the Moving Image, New York.
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My friend bluntly asked every person he met at the Temenos the same question: ‘Why are you here?’ The answers he received necessarily consisted of two stages. First, the respondent would look perplexed: wasn’t it obvious why we were all here? But then came an awareness that my friend was asking something slightly different: he was asking what had drawn the person here, most likely from some great distance, to see these particular films in this particular setting. There were filmmakers and artists, scholars and curators, a fair number of locals and a particularly large contingent from Princeton University. Some had attended the event before, but there were lots of newcomers, including myself. For many, it would be their first introduction to Markopoulos’ work, which has long been very difficult, if not impossible, to see. The filmmaker left the United States in 1967, withdrawing all his films from distribution. Since his death, they have circulated in a very restricted manner under Beavers’ supervision. Several attendees confessed to be scarcely familiar with experimental cinema at all, but were drawn to the event for reasons at times not even clear to themselves; they were certainly learning to swim by jumping in the deep end. The word ‘magical’ was often used.
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| The Immeasureable Barrier is, then, the Act of Unlearning. It is the act of disarming the meddlesome imagery of false facts which have nothing in common with the film as film. (2) | 2. Gregory J. Markopoulos, ‘The Intuition Space’, Millennium Film Journal, no. 32/33 (Fall 1998); available online here; emphasis in text. |
But perhaps we were not there for the films themselves, but rather for the event of which they formed the nucleus. The copious amounts of black leader registered not as black but as the same colour as the night, intermittently opening the pictorial surface of the screen onto the sky and space around it. While it is possible to find precedents for Eniaios in the history of experimental cinema – notably, Hollis Frampton’s epic, never-completed Magellan (1972-1980) – another kinship for the work resides in the monumentality, site specificity and concern with landscape that is found in Land Art.
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The withholding that is so central to the formal operations of Eniaios is, in this sense, also central to the work’s exhibition context, which relies on rarity and a deliberate gesture of removal. In a talk given on the last day of the screenings on the terrace of the main hotel in Loutra, the village where the majority of attendees stayed, Robert Beavers said that the Temenos gives ‘a moment of strength outside the pressures’ of institutions and finances. But so, too, does it provide a moment outside our visual culture and the economies of circulation that govern it. In an age of unprecedented image mobility and reproducibility, the promise of Eniaios is the promise of the original, of something irrevocably bound to unique temporal and geographic circumstances, of something seen in the proper format and under absolutely ideal conditions. The investigation of aura found in Land Art here gives way to a non-dialectical recovery of authenticity. As copies of all kinds proliferate, a certain yearning emerges for experiences and objects that refuse the logic of serial iteration, that move away from the multiple and towards the singular. It is a yearning felt at the Temenos and more generally in art today. This year’s dOCUMENTA (13), for example, concentrated on what one critic called the ‘emplaced condition of things’: in the room curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev designated as ‘the brain of the exhibition’, four-thousand-year-old Bactrian Princess figurines stood alongside artifacts from the National Museum in Beirut that were damaged in the Lebanese civil wars and bathroom objects that photographer Lee Miller swiped from Hitler’s apartment after visiting it as a journalist in 1945. (3) These are objects inscribed by time, by history. They are not the groundless, detached signifiers of postmodernism but rather eminently local, specific and material things. The Temenos, too, is an event founded in such an idea of emplacement, with all the notions of authenticity and originality that it implies.
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3. Steven Henry Madoff, ‘Why Curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s Documenta May Be The Most Important Exhibition of the 21st Century’, Blouin Artinfo (5 July 2012), available online here; emphasis in text.
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Of course, there are different kinds of singularity, and the lure of the original is often twinged with whiffs of commodity fetishism. Many artists today issue films and videos as high-priced limited editions, willfully denying the reproducibility inherent to the media in which they work in favour of an artificial rarity that will incite consumer desire and make the work amenable to museum collections. This is one way of responding to the increased thirst for originals in a culture of copies. The Temenos, however, was something altogether different: rather than the turning film into a Veblen good, it insisted on the singularity of the event and the inextricability of the artwork from a unique time and place. On the one hand, there was a particular sense of anachronism at play: it was a throwback to the era of grand modernist projects that, even though they came later to film than to the other arts, have now long been mostly abandoned. But on the other hand, there was something absolutely contemporary about the event and the particular intervention it made into questions of medium specificity and distribution. One wonders if the allure of the screenings would be so great if they did not stand in such stark opposition to the norms of our visual culture, predicated as they are on the ideal constant availability and the ease of format shifting afforded by digital media. It was fascinating to see how many attendees carried photochemical cameras, whether still or moving – so many love letters to an analogue technology now under threat but absolutely celebrated in Eniaios’ ceaseless return to single-frame articulation and the incorporation of colour film stocks long discontinued.
The journey to the Temenos site is a kind of pilgrimage; the experience one has there encompasses much more than just what appears on the screen. Perhaps it is entirely wrong to even try to think of Eniaios as an autonomous film cycle separable from the event that surrounds it. This event would include the exhibition context of the films, surely; but also swimming in the Ionian Sea, dinners of hyperlocal lamb and wine, passionate arguments over the cult-like mythology of Markopoulos and the state of avant-garde film, and living without hot water and Internet access for a few days. But, most of all, it would include the act of doing all these things in the company of others. Much has been written about the extent to which digital technologies make possible new kinds of cinephilia, and this is certainly true. (This very journal, after all, is a part of that.) But the digital public sphere tends to offer connectivity at the price of the physical separation of its users. The Temenos provided an opportunity for a provisional community to assemble in a spirit of profound generosity and conviviality established by Robert Beavers, the most gracious of hosts. Eniaios may not be a generous work, but the Temenos is a profoundly generous event. It partook of a gift economy in a time and place of austerity measures. Admission was free, accommodation was cheap, funds were raised through a Kickstarter campaign, and buses were donated.
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Movie Lovers We Love: Filmmaker Robert Beavers Heads to Remote Area of Greece to Screen the Never-Before-Seen Work of His Partner Gregory Markopoulos
Robert Beavers Adam Bartos
During the 1960's, Markopoulos took off from the U.S. to head to Europe, removing himself from the New American Cinema movement that he and his films ("Du Sang, de la volupté, et de la mort," "Swain," and "The Illiac Passion") had helped constitute, along with Jack Smith, Andy Warhol and others. He made the move with Beavers, who now manages the Temenos Archives in Switzerland that house Markopoulos's body of work and his own films.
In 1992, Markopoulos passed away, and since 2004, Beavers has been heading to the Temenos every four years to premiere some of the first film cycles of Markopolous' 80-hour epic film "Eniaios," which was never printed in his lifetime. Beavers is currently raising funds on Kickstarter to print 22 reels of the film for this year's screening. For each of three nights starting at sundown from June 29 to July 1, 2012, three hours of "Enianios" will be screened for an audience from around the world.
In a conversation with Indiewire, Beavers admitted he had always had fantasies of traveling to Greece, even before meeting Markopoulos. "As a boy, I had the wish to go to Greece. This was common in my generation. Growing up in New England, I was read Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Twice Told Tales," his re-telling of Greek myths for children. This was the seed for my desire to discover what Greece was. I don't know that it would have grown into a reality without this intense involvement with Greece that Markopoulos had."
But for Beavers, Greece holds a special place. He called it, with the U.S., a "key geographical point of inspiration." He continued, "For our kinds of filmmaking, it is not possible to financially sustain doing our work in just one place." And so he has been busy screening his own films across the world -- recently at NYC's The Kitchen, the University of Michigan, and the BFI.
Gregory Markopoulos filming "The Illiac Passion" with Jack Smith
But the local Greek population has been incredibly nurturing to the Temenos project. "We have this extraordinary natural location with a very special local population that is helping it to happen. We can do this because there is no infrastructure there and the costs are minimal."
Beavers glowed talking about the power of the films: "The experience of time during these projections is a different way of experiencing time than anything I've ever known, not simply because of the film's length, but also because of the wonder of the rhythm that is created in the films." And he spoke of the work he is currently restoring himself: "I'm sitting here repairing the last parts of the film that needs to be sent to the lab -- a few hundred more splices to go."
Et in Arcadia Ego
In June this year [2004.] a few hundred people gathered in a terraced field in a remote part of Arcadia in Greece to witness the world premiere of the opening cycles of Gregory Markopoulos' 80-hour film Eniaios (1947-91)
The international audience included film connoisseurs, together with others more interested in Greek culture, literature and Classical art, and curious locals from the surrounding villages. Markopoulos conceived Eniaios in the 1980s as a summation of his entire filmmaking knowledge, created specifically to be viewed at this location. The screenings, organized by filmmaker Robert Beavers (Markopoulos’ companion from the late 1960s until the latter’s death in 1992), were the result of several years’ fundraising and planning, aimed ultimately at establishing the Temenos, a film theatre, archive and library dedicated to the works of the two filmmakers, a cinematic parallel to ambitious sculptural projects such as Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field (1977) or Spiral Jetty (1970) by Robert Smithson. The site of the Temenos – which may be translated from the Greek as ‘sacred grove’, or more appropriately ‘a piece of land set apart’ – was chosen near the village of Lyssaraia, where Markopoulos’ father was born. This, according to Beavers, offered an ideal ‘viewing space in harmony with the image’.
Throughout his extraordinary life Markopoulos remained committed to ‘film as film’, and referred to filmmaking as ‘a supreme art in a dark age’. His approach was centred on the fundamental factor of the single frame as the smallest unit of a film, and the belief that a film is only a succession of distinct frames and therefore does not contain movement. Sound was often treated separately from image in his early works, and was ultimately rejected in Eniaios, which is totally silent.
Markopoulos was one of the first artists to regard the filmmaker as the individual creator of every aspect of a complete work, from production to presentation. He began making films as a student at the University of Southern California. His first work, the trilogy Du sang de la volupté et de la mort (Of the Blood of Voluptuousness and of Death, 1947), addressed homosexuality in a time before such subjects were acceptable, and following a screening at New York University in 1951 created a scandal because of its ‘suggestions that abnormal perceptions and moods are desirable’. As avant-garde cinema gained momentum throughout the 1960s, Markopoulos was recognized as one of its leading figures. Films such as Twice a Man (1963), Galaxie (1966) and 1967’s The Illiac Passion (which he felt was most representative of his life’s work) cemented his reputation as an artist whose vision was matched by his technical mastery. His practice pursued three interrelated directions (interpretations of literature or mythological sources, portraits of individuals and studies of locations or architecture) and used a variety of cinematic techniques (intuitive editing that privileged the use of the single frame and interwove simultaneous narratives in montaged film phrases, in-camera superimpositions and temporal composition improvised during the filming, together with his exacting use of sound and silence).
In 1967 Markopoulos and Beavers left the USA for Europe, and over the next few years Markopoulos withdrew all of his work from distribution and exhibition. They spent the next decades travelling and making films – based mainly in Italy, Switzerland and Greece – but screenings were rare, with the two filmmakers often rejecting invitations to show their work. For almost 25 years they relied instead on the generous patronage of individuals and occasional sales of film prints. Markopoulos famously refused to allow those who had contributed to his works ever to see them, firmly believing that the artist should be implicitly trusted to follow his own creative vision. The idea of the Temenos was first mooted by Markopoulos in 1970, and ten years later the two filmmakers chose the site. Between 1980 and 1986 annual screenings of selected early films were held there as a symbolic effort towards realizing their ultimate goal.
For the event in June 2004 most of the visitors were housed in the small spa town of Loutra Iraias. At sunset each day a minibus and cars transported the audience to the projection site 20 kilometres away, in an area of outstanding natural beauty. Local people had helped prepare the viewing area, building the wooden screen and transporting benches down from the village. As the bright moon and canopy of stars illuminated the clearing, there was a very real buzz of anticipation.
Of the 15 hours of Eniaios that have so far been printed, approximately ten hours were projected over three nights. Eniaios, which means ‘unity’, is a single, monumental film that interweaves material from Markopoulos’ entire oeuvre, spanning five decades of production. It comprises re-edited versions of his best-known films of the 1950s and 1960s, together with many unseen films made in the 1970s and 1980s. In total the work encompasses 100 individual titles, structured into 22 cycles (or ‘film orders’) of between three and five hours each.
Eniaios should be regarded as a single unit, however, to be viewed over several weeks, and is an accumulation of increasing sequences of frames, phrases, reels and cycles. Markopoulos chose to include only those images that were most significant to him, and these brief images (such as architectural details, bodies, expressions or gestures) – many of which appear only a single frame (1/24th of a second) at a time – are all separated by measures of either black or clear film, which in turn produce complete darkness or intense white light. (The longest continuous photographic image I remember seeing over these ten hours of Eniaios was about 15 seconds, with the few other ‘long shots’ only around five seconds at the most.) With this technique an image held on the screen for half a second or more becomes an intensely bold and colourful presence, and perspectival depth and motion become exaggerated; an image of a man walking towards the camera is endowed with the momentum of the Lumières’ first train approaching the unsuspecting cinema audience.
Of the Markopoulos films that have been more widely seen, it is Gammelion (1968) that comes closest to the structure of Eniaios. Ostensibly a portrait of an Italian castle, it is a 55-minute film made with only six minutes of photographed footage. Each shot is separated by hundreds of fades from and to black or white. These cuts and transitions from ‘empty screen’ to ‘image’ are not systematically calculated, but are felt and arranged in constantly developing rhythms, building gradual crescendos and diminuendos as in a piece of music.
In the editing of his later films Markopoulos allowed the spectator an incredible amount of freedom, and the unhurried pace of Eniaios allows for long, gradually developing passages that can carry the viewer to a high perceptual level. It is not necessary to hold onto, or question, every individual image: the film experience as a whole is articulated through the accumulation of the larger phrases and the emotions they create in the individual viewer. The spectator, occasionally drifting between sleep and consciousness, is frequently lifted into the ‘intuition space’ created by the filmmaker.
It’s impossible to concentrate on the screen for 80 hours, or even one evening’s projection, and Markopoulos did not expect this. The act of viewing was informal; it was possible to get up and walk around, or to step back and watch the screen from a distance, appreciating its location within the natural environment. The frequent use of clear film throws an intense white light on the screen, which is in turn reflected back, illuminating the entire site and making the audience aware of their surroundings.
The concept of the Temenos is often misinterpreted as an arrogant or separatist ideal; in fact, it is about respecting the work and its demands, presenting it correctly and giving the audience an absolutely unique and elevated experience. Though the idea developed out of Markopoulos’ frustration with what he found to be the inadequate presentation and general disregard of film as an art, it sought to provide the spectator with the opportunity to see and understand the work as it was intended. As details of the sequences of images from the films begin to fade from memory, what remains is the sense of being there. The act of being at the Temenos, within the surrounding landscape and culture, is as much a part of the experience as the contents of the monumental reels of film.
With thanks to Robert Beavers. - Mark Webber
TWICE A MAN
Gregory J. Markopoulos, USA, 1963, 49 mins
Twice A Man is a fragmented re-imagining of the Greek myth of Hippolytus, who was killed after rejecting the advances of his stepmother. Markopoulos’ vision transposes the legend to 1960s New York and has its main character abandon his mother for an elder man. Employing sensuous use of colour, the film radicalised narrative construction with its mosaic of ‘thought images’ that shift tenses and compress time. One of the touchstones of independent filmmaking, Twice A Man was made in the same remarkable milieu as Scorpio Rising and Flaming Creatures by a filmmaker named ‘the American avant-garde cinema’s supreme erotic poet’ by its key critic P. Adams Sitney.
Dedicated to Clara Hoover. Based on the story of Hippolytos. Music by Pyotr Tchaikovsky: excerpt from Manfred Symphony, op. 58. Assistant director: Charles Levine. Cast: Paul Kilb (Paul), Olympia Dukakis (the young mother), Violet Roditi (the aged mother), Albert Torgessen (the artist-physician). Voice: Olympia Dukakis. Filmed in New York City, Staten Island and Bear Mountain Park.
EROS, O BASILEUS
Gregory J. Markopoulos, USA, 1967, 45 mins
Markopoulos’ invocation of Eros merges classical and contemporary imagery by placing the male god of love in an artists’ loft. The sole protagonist, predominantly naked, appears in a series of tableaux surrounded by icons of creativity, including paintings, books and filmmaking equipment. This sculptural study of the human form is energised by flash frames, stylised fades, and Strauss’ tone-poem ‘Ein Heldenleben’. Eros is portrayed by the young filmmaker Robert Beavers, who had recently moved to New York after seeing films by Markopoulos and other New American Cinema pioneers. Both soon left America for Europe, where they remained together until Markopoulos’ death in 1992.
Dedicated to Ben Weber. Music by Richard Strauss: excerpts from Ein Heldenleben. Cast: Robert Beavers (Eros). Filmed in New York City.
THROUGH A LENS BRIGHTLY: MARK TURBYFILL
Gregory J. Markopoulos, USA, 1967, 15 mins
The life of painter, dancer and poet Mark Turbyfill, seen here in his 70th year, is evoked through traditional portraiture and personal objects.
Dedicated to Tom Chomont. Cast: Mark Turbyfill. Filmed in Chicago.
MING GREEN
Gregory J. Markopoulos, USA, 1966, 7 mins
Ming Green is an extraordinary self-portrait conveyed through the multiple layered superimpositions of the filmmaker’s sparsely furnished room.
Dedicated to Stan Brakhage. Music by Richard Wagner: Traumen from Wesendonck Lieder (Wesendonck Song Cycle). Filmed in New York City. - Secret Cinema
Kristin Jones: Ming Green: The Color of Memory
Printed in Millennium Film Journal No. 32/33 (Fall 1998) Beavers/Markopoulos
In his memoir, Speak Memory, Vladimir Nabokov recollects his mother's need to cherish things she loved in her past and in her daily surroundings. "In a way I inherited an exquisite simulacrum," he writes, "the beauty of intangible property, unreal estate -- and this proved a splendid training for the endurance of later losses." 1 Gregory Markopoulos' cinema is fueled by a similar urge. In early spring of 1966, in anticipation of his eventual departure from the Greenwich Village apartment in which he had been living for a number of years, he filmed the revelatory seven-minute interior portrait Ming Green , titled for the deep spruce color of the apartment's walls. Ming Green was edited entirely in-camera, and its precise rhythmic blossoming is based on overlapping dissolves and longer flashes, rather than single-frame clusters. The film's complex harmonic structure, however -- as well as its incorporation of often static, "single" images that may be comprised of more than one frame -- echoes the montage techniques developed in Twice a Man (1963). 2 Interweaving mementos with foliage, color, and light, Ming Green suggests the inextricability of past and present: despite its exquisite lightness, it could represent the passage of hours and days rather than minutes. It also contains slender strands of themes woven through Markopoulos' other, larger projects.
The film's movement, through rhythmic flashes, overlapping fades, and superimpositions, is from exterior to interior, both literally and figuratively. The first shot consists simply of a grisaille of sun-drenched trees, glimpsed through a window framed by orange drapes like shadowy flames. When I first saw Ming Green, this frontal composition reminded me ofDay , a lithograph of the Symbolist painter Odilon Redon, created in 1890 as part of his "Dreams" portfolio, and an image in which a sunlit tree replaces the oversized heads and stained glass contained by windows in some of his other graphic works. Markopoulos' attitude toward nature, like Redon's, was intensely subjective, and his modernist aesthetic did not preclude a belief in its restorative power. In both Day and in the opening shot of Ming Green, the natural world, in the form of a few branch
Ming Green's later sequences are accompanied by the song Träumen (Dreams) from Richard Wagner's Five Songs for Mathilde
Wesendonck, interpreted by Kirsten Flagstad. Its opening shots, window slowly blinking -- separated each time by a length of black leader -- before being replaced by a shot of foliage in the garden. Ming Green then begins to interweave greenery with the green room. A view of the interior with a brilliant red lacquered chair is followed by overlapping shots of a spring bud. In a single magical image, a slowly flickering shot of rustling masses of leaves in the garden is superimposed on one of the red chair; in another, an open book on a shelf appears to float against trees and foliage. These complex superimpositions culminate in a dazzling cluster of shots showing the window and patterns of sunlight on various surfaces in the room -- a quasi-cubistic blossoming of light that is echoed in two subsequent "films of place," Bliss (1967) and Sorrows (1969).
After the garden sequence, Ming Green unfurls a succession of objects with personal significance. One is a photographic nude hanging between the windows -- which are now shown with the curtains drawn -- by Edmund Teske, an acquaintance of the filmmaker. A large, pink, artificial rose seen standing by a fireplace in another composition was a gift from three students who had attended a lecture by Markopoulos at their college. Three record albums are also seen propped up on a table like works of art. Ming Green is dedicated to Stan Brakhage, whom Markopoulos credited with suggesting the idea for the film, and the luminous vertical streak to the right of the frame in another shot of the green interior is a strip of film from Brakhage's Mothlight.
The real trees and foliage in the garden may have triggered this flickering reverie, but Ming Green's exquisite climax involves the artificial rose. As the music gains intensity, this oversized blossom fills the frame, pulling in and out of focus as it is superimposed with a flickering close-up of a leaf filigreed by light. These pulsing, almost fluttering images are interwoven with longer shots of the flower standing in the green room, which has come to resemble a lush garden at dusk. We then see a row of books -- including volumes by Djuna Barnes, Thomas Mann, and Nikos Kazantzakis -- followed by a slowly blinking close-up of a drum-shaped, scarlet-and-gold Christmas ornament hanging above. This trinket echoes a drumming wind-up toy soldier in Christmas U.S.A. (1949), one of Markopoulos' early black-and-white psychodramas; here, however, it is the image itself that beats, in a beautiful visual pun that underlines the musicality of Markopoulos' editing technique. An array of framed photographs on the walls of the apartment glimpsed in the remaining minutes of the film includes an image of Paul Kilb, the protagonist of Twice a Man; a snapshot of Markopoulos as a child held by his father; and a portrait of Clara Hoover, who represented Io in The Illiac Passion (1964-67), and who was also a valuable patron, providing Markopoulos with the funds to complete Twice a Man.
As it draws to a close, Ming Green becomes a pulsing sensual entity formed of densely interlaced images that include the fabric of the orange drapes and the houndstooth pattern of a Greek blanket. Among these flickering frames, a drawing by Markopoulos can barely be glimpsed, its baroque lines blending into the texture of the plaster in a superimposed image of the green wall. We also see a casually arranged dress shirt, shot from a distance and in close-up, at one point appearing to float like the book seen at the beginning of the film. A touching trace of the filmmaker's physical presence, the shirt was part of his elegant daily attire -- which was compared by Brakhage in a lecture at the Whitney Museum in 1996 to the armor worn by a knight of the Round Table "just living for an occasional glimpse of the grail."
Ming Green's final image, a framed photograph of the filmmaker's mother, is held before blurring to the final notes of the sound track. When one knows that Maria Markopoulos died of cancer in January of 1966, shortly beforeMing Green was filmed, it is difficult not to see the erotic bliss signaled by the throbbing rose as a prelude to oblivion and death. Despite the grief delicately expressed in its final image, however, Ming Green is not a mournful film, but rather an ardent paean to emotion and memory.
It is also a chromatic chamber piece. Color was essential to Markopoulos' oeuvre from 1947 onward, but Ming Green's radiant palette is synonymous with memory, as the cool dark shade of the apartment's walls becomes a green field against which objects -- many in a fiery spectrum of pink, red, gold, or orange -- are brilliantly arrayed. Like Markopoulos' other color films, Ming Green is a unified whole made up of multicolored fragments that are dispersed over time, resonating against one another in the spectator's memory, as if past, present, and future were inseparable. The film's rhythmic temporal blossoming is joined to the equivalent of simultaneous contrast in painting, or what Redon once called the "mutual exaltation of colors." 3
In addition to reflecting the jewel-like palette of both apartment and film, Ming Green's title points to the preciousness of emotion in Markopoulos' oeuvre. Above all, it conjures the memories that unfold within the film like an inexhaustible text. It was in this apartment, after all, that Markopoulos edited Twice a Man and The Illiac Passion, works of shimmering complexity that reflect his most profound ideas about cinema as an all-encompassing medium. Through the filmmaker's fervent vision, this modest apartment becomes an "exquisite simulacrum," or the very distillation of the art of remembrance.
SORROWS (1969)
In 1967, after nearly two decades of brilliant, innovative filmmaking, Markopoulos and his lover, Robert Beavers, abandoned the U.S. for Greece. They not only left physically; they also prohibited the distribution of the films in America, refused interviews, and demanded the excision of a chapter on the director in P. Adams Sitney's seminal Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde from later editions. It was only after his death (from lymphoma in 1992), and in fact only in the last year or so that Beavers, a vigilant guardian of Markopoulos's work, has allowed it to be shown in the U.S.
The Illiac PassionSeeing these films after 30 years of unavailability gives us a welcome chance to reevaluate this uniquely gifted artist. Born in 1928 in Toledo, Ohio, Markopoulos starting making movies at age 12. His subjects were classical and romantic: novels by Dickens, Bronte, and Hemingway. By the age of 18 he was well versed in cinema aesthetics and those whose work made the greatest case for cinema as art: Josef von Sternberg, Jean Cocteau, Bunuel. If we say he was influenced by these auteurs, it isn't to imply that he was derivative. His 1947-1948 trilogy Du sang, de la volupte, et la mort (Of Blood, of Pleasure, and of Death) already shows formal innovations that set his work apart and would continue to do so — specifically, the flash-cut, where the screen goes dark briefly between shots, creating a kind of trance state in the viewer. Later, he would expand this device to stunning effect with in-camera superimpositions, double-exposures, and the breathtaking "strobe-edit" where images flash on and off sometimes apart from, sometimes within other images. These strategies are part of Markopoulos's elliptical, imagistic approach to the narrative, where the viewer is seduced into participating in what's occurring onscreen in a way that's impossible in linear narrative.
Twice a ManHomosexual and lesbian themes appear in Du sang and other early films. Swain (1950), inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne's Fanshawe, features a dreamlike narrative of a young man's ritualized rejection of heterosexuality, as a mysterious woman in white gossamer pursues him through a ruined landscape. The handsome Markopoulos appears in several of his own films, and stars in this one. By the early '60s, with works like Twice a Man (1963) and later, The Illiac Passion (1967), his celebration of the male body and an incorporation of homosexual imagery into a wider aesthetic fabric reaches its peak. Both films draw again on classical sources — the former the myth of Hippolytus and Phaedra, the latter Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound. The imagery in The Illiac Passion is striking in its hypnotic repetitions, particularly in a sequence where a man repeatedly attempts to walk, but finds himself unable to move, perhaps trapped in the director's powerful mise-en-scene. The filmmaker isolates portions of the nude male body to fragment the viewer's perception, then flashes images of the whole man in naked splendor. Warhol regular Taylor Mead adds some amusing moments as a kind of demented bird-figure in a pink tattered dress, but most mesmerizing is the recurring motif of the romanticized male in a posture of longing. In one highly charged sequence, a beautiful man lies in a bathtub holding a scarab, which he slowly kisses.
Markopoulos's power as cinematic inventor extends to his soundtracks. In The Illiac Passion, he reads from Thoreau's translation of Prometheus Bound but he "edits" the words just as he does the images, repeating phrases as if they were chants, with the repetitions alternating with silences.
By the time of the short Ming Green (1966), Markopoulos had brought his formal innovations to an extraordinary level of clarity and simplicity. This brief film, a paean by the filmmaker to his New York apartment (the title refers to the color of the walls), dazzles the viewer with its use of the strobe-edit and the superimposition, bringing an empty, quiet space to gorgeous, glittering life.
A year after Ming Green, Markopoulos moved to Europe, where he continued to make films, some of which have yet to be developed. Like the classical sources that inspired his work, Greece held the promise of something he couldn't find in America, a kind of artistic purity without the demands of commerce or the more subtle pressures from a fickle avant-garde. He and Robert Beavers developed the idea of a pure exhibition space — an open-air field in the Greek countryside — in which to show his films. This concept, despite its practical difficulty, is in keeping with the poignant perfection of Markopoulos's artistry, and represents the same uncompromising ideal that drove his work. - www.divxclasico.com/
Psyche
Directed by Gregory Markopoulos
US 1947, 16mm, color, 25 min.
This early film by Markopoulos was inspired by an unfinished novella by French poet and novelist Pierre Louÿs, whose sensuous evocations of ancient eroticism set the tone for the filmmaker’s own poetic enterprise. Featuring a musical excerpt from Ralph Vaughan Williams’s "Serenade," the film was made while Markopoulos was studying at the University of Southern California and attending lectures by celebrated filmmaker Josef von Sternberg. Psyche was filmed in and around Los Angeles and the Hollywood Hills with performers chosen for their appearance and for the naturalness of their gestures.
Himself as Herself
Directed by Gregory Markopoulos
US 1967, 16mm, color, 60 min.
One of the most vertiginous of Markopoulos's interior landscape studies, Himself as Herself is based loosely on Balzac's Séraphita. The film consists of a shimmering, nearly plotless evocation of gender identity in flux, and it contains some of Markopoulos’s most haunting, densely interlaced images. This film is dedicated to the American artist Emlen Pope Etting and features a musical excerpt from Poulenc's "Gloria."
Bliss
Directed by Gregory Markopoulos
Greece 1967, 16mm, color, 6 min.
The first film made by Markopoulos after moving to Europe, Bliss was shot over the course of two days using only available light to create a lyrical study of the interior of the Church of St. John on the island of Hydra.
The Illiac Passion
Directed by Gregory Markopoulos
US 1964-67, 16mm, color, 92 min.
With Taylor Mead, Andy Warhol, Jack Smith
One of Markopoulos’s most critically acclaimed films, The Illiac Passion is an ambitious work based on Prometheus Unbound. For his cast, Markopoulos made imaginative use of artist friends and underground figures in the roles of mythical beings. The result is a lively, resolutely contemporary reimagining of the classical realm with striking imagery and a sound track that features the filmmaker’s reading of Thoreau’s translation of the Aeschylus text and excerpts from Bartók.
Galaxie
Directed by Gregory Markopoulos
US 1966, 16mm, color, 92 min.
A veritable who’s who of the art world in the mid-1960s, Galaxie includes portraits of thirty-three painters, poets, critics, filmmakers, and choreographers. Shooting with his Bolex camera and utilizing an intricate system he developed that allowed for multiple images and for editing the entire work in-camera, Markopoulos created elaborate portraits of such seminal figures as W. H. Auden, Jasper Johns, Erick Hawkins, and Susan Sontag.
Political Portraits
Directed by Gregory Markopoulos
Switzerland/Italy/West Germany 1969, 16mm, color, 60 min.
Each consisting of a single film roll, these portraits are of people Markopoulos encountered in the late 1960s in Europe. As he noted, the film is meant to be seen as "political portraits in the Greek sense, daily living." Like Galaxie, these portraits feature major figures from across the arts, including the painter Giorgio de Chirico and dancer Rudolf Nureyev. - Harvard Film Archive
Christmas USA (1949 )
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