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Gregory Markopoulos in his 1950 'Swain'
GREEK-AMERICAN filmmaker Gregory J Markopoulos had an ideal place in mind to
screen his kinetic, intensely coloured works. For him and for longtime
collaborator and companion Robert Beavers, the perfect setting to show their
films was Lyssaraia, Arcadia, the place where Markopoulos' parents were born.
During the summers of 1980-1986, Markopoulos and Beavers projected films there
for a devoted crowd in a terraced field, under the stars. People came for the
experience and because Markopoulos' work had become nearly impossible to see
since he left New York in 1967, at the peak of his success as a non-mainstream
film pioneer.
Markopoulos' reputation only grew in his absence. Then, from the 1970s on, he
decided only to shoot and edit new works, but not develop them - leaving over
a hundred works that form his ambitious 22-cycle, 80-hour, silent ENIAIOS
("Unified", or "Whole") unseen. After his unexpected 1992 death, the expensive
project of making viewing copies of these works was left to filmmaker Beavers,
who established the Temenos Foundation. Beavers has spearheaded the
fundraising effort to have ENIAIOS seen.
Since his death, controversial Markopoulos has experienced nothing short of a
revival, aided by the Temenos Foundation's production of new prints for a
dozen works from 1948 to 1971. The Whitney Museum of American Art (in 1996)
was among established institutions that held retrospectives of the
non-institutional, non-commercial, but eternity-gazing artist.
Athens revisits Markopoulos
A small tip of Markopoulos' iceberg of works is finally arriving in Athens.
Though the Goethe Institute (14-16 Omirou St, tel 210-360-8111) is no
Lyssaraia, it will host four of Markopoulos' restored films on May 28 at
7.30pm. They include 1947 short Psyche, based on an unfinished Pierre
Louy story about a lesbian dealing with male advances, and Twice A Man,
a 1963 Hippolytus and Phaedra story featuring then-unknown Olympia Dukakis.
The press had an early peek at two more of the short films: Ming Green
(1966) and Bliss (1967). The first film is a portrait of
Markopoulos' West 11th Street New York apartment shortly before he moved out.
The shutter constantly "blinks" at different corners of the flat, creating a
hallucinatory effect. At one point, a red chair becomes the centre of an
explosion of colour and slices of light. Common images become fascinating as
time has collapsed. Bliss is set in Hydra's Agios Ioannis Church. There
is again rapid-fire editing and an astounding superimposition of layers of
Byzantine images.
These films demonstrate Markopoulos' incredible craft of in-camera editing,
employing reversal film. To add a superimposed image, he would shoot once,
then rewind 5-12 feet of film and shoot again. This would add layers of images
"like the rings of a tree", Beavers told the Athens News at the press
screening. The May 28 event will include talks (in English) by Rotterdam
Festival director Simon Field and Beavers.
Ancient myth meets the future
Markopoulos, Beavers told the local press, was "one of the very first to do
every stage of the filmmaking himself", economically shooting, lighting and
editing his works. More like a Renaissance painter, than a 20th-century
director, he relied on private patrons rather than studios for funding.
Artistic control extended beyond his death. He left behind a legacy of film
and documents in Temenos' climate-controlled Zurich vaults.
Born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1928 and schooled in film briefly at the University
of Southern California, Markopoulos began his film career at 19, exploring
issues of gender roles and homosexuality in his first trilogy of films
(including Psyche). In the 1950s he continued to make films and
abstract paintings and travelled in Europe.
His film school time gave Markopoulos a taste of Hollywood. Director Josef von
Sternberg was his teacher and he had a look at the likes of Fritz Lang at
work. Yet later on, experiences with the system inevitably went sour. Between
1958 and 1961, for instance, he was frustrated by work on feature
Serenity about the aftermath of the Asia Minor war. A version of that
film, according to Artforum International, remains locked up in an
Athens vault due to trouble with producers.
Between 1964 and '67, Markopoulos returned to the US and became one of the
founding members of the self-help organisation, the New American Cinema group.
(The group's first statement captures his lifelong credo: "Our realistic
budgets give us freedom from stars, studios and producers.") He created
three-hour work The Illiac Passion, using friends (including Andy
Warhol as Poseidon) in the cast.
His years in Europe produced works on Mystra Byzantine churches
(Hagiographia, 1970) and many films of the ENIAIA cycles, waiting to be
seen.
A writer in many film publications, Markopoulos expressed his own view of
cinema in a 1975 theoretical piece "The Intuition Space". This treatise
includes enigmatic references to a new species, as well as an ecstatic
treatise on film's possibilities. Film content, he writes, "is like a
magnificent, superterrestrial, chlorophyllic process (in constant
Evolution)..." He insists upon the power of a single frame. "The film image is
the crystallisation of time," he writes. "One particle of time contains
trillions of imprisoned images." People need to see things in a new way he
proposes - maybe they should take Beavers' proposal and re-examine the space
between each frame. "Who can dare to imagine what a single frame might
contain?" Markopoulos asks.
Beavers, the heir to Markopoulos' philosophy, adds today: "When a master
simplifies the means of how he creates, it [the art] goes deeper."
ENIAIOS debut in 2004
250 viewers will have a chance to be the first audience members to see the
beginning of ENIAIOS. The first four cycles of this series will be shown in
Lyssaraia in June 2004; thirteen hours of films will be projected over three
nights. Beavers, with the help of the JF Costopoulos, Schwyzer Winiker and
other foundations, raised the necessary $80,000 needed for the prints. He is
committed to showing the films as Markopoulos intended.
* The event is sponsored by 'Highlights' magazine
* On the web: www.the-temenos.org
