GREGORY MARKOPOULOS
Friday 6 November 1998, at 9:00pm
London Lux Centre

The work of Gregory Markopoulos occupies a unique position in the history of film. He is widely regarded as one of the masters of the cinematic art, yet since he departed the United States in 1967 his films have been almost impossible to see. As a result of his need for total control over the presentation of his vision, he increasingly withdrew himself and his films from the film community he had been so actively involved in.

Markopoulos was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1928. He was the son of Greek parents and was encouraged to speak their native language up until he entered an English speaking school. In 1940 he was given an 8mm camera and made one of his first films A Christmas Carol (1940). That film survives but others from 1940-45 were destroyed by the filmmaker. After studying film at the University of Southern California and assisting Curtis Harrington on Fragment Of Seeking (1946), he made the film Psyche (1947). With Lysis and Charmides (both 1948), it formed a trilogy titled Du sang de la volupte et de la mort (1947-48), an early cinematic representation of homosexual love. In the following years he made a number of films, including Swain and Flowers Of Asphalt (both 1951), in which he refined his technique. In 1954 he destroyed all of his journals and travelled to Greece to start anew. He developed a scenario for the film Serenity (1955-60) and spent several years travelling between Greece and the USA to raise funding. The film was shot in 1958 using predominantly untrained Greek actors. In 1960 he edited the film and composed a soundtrack using simultaneous English, Greek, German and Russian narration. It was premiered as an unfinished work print in October 1961, but after three screenings Markopoulos was forced to return the film to the production company in order to get his director’s fee. He never saw his film again, despite employing an attorney try to get it back in 1963. The same year he published Quest for Serenity (Journal of a Film-maker) detailing the film’s eight year long history. Meanwhile, since 1961, Markopoulos had been working on Twice A Man (1963) based on the myth of Hippolytus. The film begins with a two minute long blank screen accompanied by the sound of rain, and then proceeds to demonstrate the filmmaker’s mastery of composition, editing and use of the single frame. The soundtrack is also innovative, as Markopoulos fragments words and phases by manipulating the audio tape. It remains a major work of the mythopoeic cinema. In 1964, he began work on his next epic, inspired by Prometheus Bound, the film which would eventually become The Illiac Passion (1967). During the period in which he was editing and securing funding for that film, he made three films edited entirely in-camera. Galaxie (1966) is a series of thirty one minute portraits of the artistic and intellectual community of Manhattan. Some portraits were exposed up to ten times and all fades, dissolves and single frames were achieved at the time of shooting. Ming Green (1966) is an immaculately constructed portrait of his apartment that was shot in a single afternoon. Through A Lens Brightly: Mark Turbyfill (1967) is a biographical portrait of the dancer and poet.

MING GREEN
Gregory Markopoulos, USA, 1966, 16mm, colour, sound, 7 min

“The reason the film is called Ming Green is because it’s about a very beautiful apartment, a very simple apartment, that I had in New York for about six or seven years. The apartment was painted ming green, which is a sort of Chinese-y colour. Stan Brakhage gave me the idea. He said mine was the only apartment in New York City that he could stand to come and visit, because it was very, very quiet. The important thing about this film is that all the editing was done in the camera itself. As you already probably know, I have a system in which I edit using single frames and it gets very, very complicated, as in Twice A Man or Himself As Herself. In Ming Green all these single frames, all these superimpositions were done in the camera itself.” (from a lecture given by Gregory Markopoulos at Kent State University, 1968)

After making Himself as Herself and Eros, O Basileus (both 1967) in New York, Markopoulos moved to Europe, ostensibly to raise money to finally print The Illiac Passion. While in Greece he made the architectural portrait Bliss (1967), and in Italy he shot Gammelion (1967-68), for which five minutes of footage filmed in the 365 rooms of the Castello Roccasinibalda was extended to almost an hour using over a thousand fades. In the autumn of 1967, Markopoulos was living in Brussels where he persuaded a consortium of businessmen to fund the completion of The Illiac Passion. The film had been shot in 1964 and starred Richard Beauvais alongside a cast of well-known underground personalities, including Andy Warhol, Gerard Malanga, Taylor Mead, Beverly Grant and Jack Smith. It was originally edited in the first half of 1965, and was then intended as a three hour long, triple projection film in which 35, 16 and 8mm frames would be superimposed on each other to demonstrate different layers of consciousness. During the printing process, Markopoulos commuted between Brussels and the lab in Boulder, Colorado. After a thirty minute section had been completed, he realised that the film would never be ready in time for the film festival at Knokke-le-Zoute, so he reconceived and reedited the film into the 92 minute version that exists today.

THE ILLIAC PASSION
Gregory Markopoulos, USA, 1967, 16mm, colour, sound, 92 min

“It would, perhaps, be well at this point to inform the film spectator and reader interested in my work, that The Illiac Passion has become on two levels (without going into exact detail) the spoken and visual Odyssean journey of the filmmaker. From the moment that the figure of Mr. Beauvais appeared that evening while I was working at Marlboro Books in Greenwich Village, New York, and one of the employees whispered “that’s the Prometheus you have been searching for”, to the final casting of Mr. Jack Smith as Orpheus towards the final days of the film production, this film has taxed every nerve, fibre and muscle of my Being. That this should have been so is only fitting, for was not Prometheus himself daily visited by that uncompromising eagle sent by Zeus! An eagle whose arrival one never sees in the film, but only hears its piercing cry. A cry oddly American; a cry containing the elements of the wronged, of the misunderstood.” (Gregory Markopoulos in his essay The Adamantine Bridge (for Paul Kilb), Film Culture #53-54-55, 1972)

After the success of The Illiac Passion, Markopoulos continued to work in Europe for the next two years up until Sorrows (1969). Through the 1970s, though he continued to shoot films (including Genius, 1970, a version of Faust featuring David Hockney), they were rarely printed. Markopoulos was already developing plans for the Temenos, a dedicated theatre and archive that was to be constructed in his father’s home town of Lyssaraia in Greece. He severed his remaining ties with the film community in 1974, by disassociating himself from Anthology Film Archives and asking P. Adams Sitney to remove the chapter on his films from subsequent editions of the book Visionary Film. In the summer of 1980, Gregory Markopoulos and Robert Beavers held their first, free, open-air screenings on a hillside above Lyssaraia. The screenings were accompanied by publications and this tradition continued annually until 1986. In the 1980s, Markopoulos also worked on Enaiaos (1948-91), a series of twenty-two silent film cycles containing material from his forty years as a filmmaker. The series was fully edited, but not printed, before his death in 1992. It consists of over eighty hours of film and will cost an estimated $770,000 to complete. Robert Beavers is continuing to pursue the construction of the Temenos, and intends to build an archive for Markopoulos’ journals, letters, script, articles and reviews which the filmmaker had linen-bound in handmade cases and are currently stored in a Swiss vault, together with a film theatre for presentation of the complete Enaiaos. In 1999, Temenos Inc. will resume the summer screening programme at a temporary site in Lyssaraia.

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