LITERATURE AND MYTH
Friday 16 April 2004, at 6.20pm
London National Film Theatre NFT2

SWAIN
Gregory Markopoulos, USA, 1950, 16mm, colour, sound, 25 min

TWICE A MAN
Gregory Markopoulos, USA, 1963, 16mm, colour, sound, 49 min

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 were 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 up to that point.

In recent years the films of Markopoulos have been gradually reintroduced to the viewing public and have been honoured at major museums and festivals, including retrospectives at the American Centre (Paris 1995), The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York 1996), Pacific Film Archive (San Francisco 1997) The Film Society of Lincoln Centre (New York 2003) and Harvard Film Archive (2003). In May 2003, Robert Beavers and Simon Field presented a screening of Markopoulos films at the Goethe Institute, Athens, to an audience exceeding 350 people, and in June 2004, Temenos Inc. will resume the summer screening programme at the outdoor site in Lyssaraia.

This National Film Theatre season is the first time that so many of the films of Markopoulos have been shown in England on such a scale. Since he withdrew his films from exhibition in the early 1970s, they have been virtually impossible to see in the UK. This high-profile event will also act as a precursor to the resumption of outdoor Temenos projections at a remote site near Arcadia in the Peloponnese in June 2004, where restored films from the epic Eniaios cycle will be presented in public the first time. For three consecutive nights, screenings will take place from 10pm to 4am in the place chosen by Markopoulos as the ideal site for a spectator’s quest, in which his films may elevate the spectators’ sense of time while emotionally and physically connecting them to the mythic themes and locations.

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 volupté 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.

‘Swain is an evocation in gentle images and visual symbols of a subconscious rejection of the stereotyped masculine role that society and women insist upon. This rejection takes the form of an escape: a flight into fantasy from what is visually conceived as crude, repelling sexuality into the purity of creative activity, of nature, and of the individual personality left inviolate’ (Donald Weinstein)

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 receive 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 troubled eight year long history.

Meanwhile, since 1961, Markopoulos had been working on Twice A Man (1963) based on Markopoulos’s modernist reworking of the myth of Hippolytus, in which a chaste youth rejects the incestuous advances of his mother, Phaedre, and is saved from death by a caring physician. For Markopoulos, this short feature represented his most elaborate attempt to date to create ‘a new narrative form through the fusion of the classic montage technique with a more abstract system.’ The film opens with an extended passage of black leader and the sound of falling rain before plunging into a dazzlingly complex array of interwoven single frames and clusters of images to elaborate a tale of artistic rebirth.

‘The protagonist grapples with past, present, and future while pursuing Eros and creativity… Paul encounters a labyrinth of memories, echoing with colour and pierced by shards of syncopated speech that form a portion of the film’s extraordinary soundtrack.’ (Kristin M. Jones)

The soundtrack is also innovative, as Markopoulos fragments words and phases by manipulating the audio tape. It remains a major work of mythopoeic cinema.

(Mark Webber)

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FILMS OF PLACE
Sat 17 April 2004, at 6.20pm
London National Film Theatre NFT2

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

GAMMELION
Gregory Markopoulos, Italy, 1968, 16mm, colour, sound, 54 min

SORROWS
Gregory Markopoulos, Switzerland, 1969, 16mm, colour, sound, 6 min

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 were 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 up to that point.

In recent years the films of Markopoulos have been gradually reintroduced to the viewing public and have been honoured at major museums and festivals, including retrospectives at the American Centre (Paris 1995), The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York 1996), Pacific Film Archive (San Francisco 1997) The Film Society of Lincoln Centre (New York 2003) and Harvard Film Archive (2003). In May 2003, Robert Beavers and Simon Field presented a screening of Markopoulos films at the Goethe Institute, Athens, to an audience exceeding 350 people, and in June 2004, Temenos Inc. will resume the summer screening programme at the outdoor site in Lyssaraia.

This National Film Theatre season is the first time that so many of the films of Markopoulos have been shown in England on such a scale. Since he withdrew his films from exhibition in the early 1970s, they have been virtually impossible to see in the UK. This high-profile event will also act as a precursor to the resumption of outdoor Temenos projections at a remote site near Arcadia in the Peloponnese in June 2004, where restored films from the epic Eniaios cycle will be presented in public the first time. For three consecutive nights, screenings will take place from 10pm to 4am in the place chosen by Markopoulos as the ideal site for a spectator’s quest, in which his films may elevate the spectators’ sense of time while emotionally and physically connecting them to the mythic themes and locations.

In 1964, he began work on 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 33 portraits of the artistic and intellectual community of Manhattan. Through a Lens Brightly: Mark Turbyfill (1967) is a biographical portrait of the dancer and poet. Ming Green (1966) is an immaculately constructed portrait of his apartment that was shot in a single afternoon. This portrait, painted in the colour of the title, was made a few months before his departure from New York. It is dedicated to the filmmaker Stan Brakhage and was shot without a scenario and edited entirely in the camera: ‘The orchestration of colour, the controlled metrics of the flashing and superimposing images, the sureness of the composition, and the careful placement of musical excerpts make this film one of Markopoulos’ most successful achievements of in-camera editing’ (P. Adams Sitney)

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 seven minutes of footage filmed in the 365 rooms of the Castello Roccasinibalda was extended to almost an hour using over a thousand fades.

‘Shot in available light and with only two rolls of film, Gammelion portrays Castello Roccasinibalda, a castle in Italy with which Markopoulos had long been entranced. Each ‘film phrase’ consisted of only a few frames which he later combined with hundreds of fade-ins and fade-outs, extending seven minutes of footage to 60. The soundtrack includes Rilke’s text: ‘To be Loved, is to be Consumed…’ read forward and in reverse.’ (Pacific Film Archives)

‘Gammelion takes its title from the Greek month suitable for marriage. As the screen slowly winks from dark to light and the reverse, tiny shots – sometimes just single frames – are interjected of the landscape around the castle. We gradually move closer and closer to it, view the corridors, glimpse a nude couple in the frescoes, and then move outside again. The impression of Gammelion is quite unlike that of any other Markopoulos film. It is at once terribly sparse and very rich.’ (P. Adams Sitney)

After The Illiac Passion, Markopoulos continued to work in Europe for the next two years up until Sorrows (1969). Set to music by Beethoven, this lyrical portrait moves from a chilled and misty exterior to the crystalline interior of the Swiss chateau that King Ludwig II built for Wagner.

‘It’s a film in which all of the editing is done in camera. It was very cold that day, there was a little bit of fog, but as I filmed, starting at the main entrance along the road, the fog sort of lifted. The first roll was the outside, the second the inside. By the time I got inside, the sun kept coming out – so it’s like a piece of crystal, it comes to light. I just used a motif from Beethoven’s Leonore overture, which Wagner liked very much.’ (Markopoulos interviewed by Jonas Mekas)

Through the 1970s, though he continued to shoot films (including Genius, 1970, a vision 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.

(Mark Webber)

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THE ILLIAC PASSION
Sat 17 April 2004, at 8.40pm
London National Film Theatre NFT2

BLISS
Gregory Markopoulos, Greece, 1967, 16mm, colour, silent, 6 min

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

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 were 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 up to that point.

In recent years the films of Markopoulos have been gradually reintroduced to the viewing public and have been honoured at major museums and festivals, including retrospectives at the American Centre (Paris 1995), The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York 1996), Pacific Film Archive (San Francisco 1997) The Film Society of Lincoln Centre (New York 2003) and Harvard Film Archive (2003). In May 2003, Robert Beavers and Simon Field presented a screening of Markopoulos films at the Goethe Institute, Athens, to an audience exceeding 350 people, and in June 2004, Temenos Inc. will resume the summer screening programme at the outdoor site in Lyssaraia.

This National Film Theatre season is the first time that so many of the films of Markopoulos have been shown in England on such a scale. Since he withdrew his films from exhibition in the early 1970s, they have been virtually impossible to see in the UK. This high-profile event will also act as a precursor to the resumption of outdoor Temenos projections at a remote site near Arcadia in the Peloponnese in June 2004, where restored films from the epic Eniaios cycle will be presented in public the first time. For three consecutive nights, screenings will take place from 10pm to 4am in the place chosen by Markopoulos as the ideal site for a spectator’s quest, in which his films may elevate the spectators’ sense of time while emotionally and physically connecting them to the mythic themes and locations.

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),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.

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 starring 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 30-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 re-edited the film into the 92-minute version that exists today.

(Mark Webber)

For me the inspiration for The Illiac Passion was derived from Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound: from the multitude of impressions I had had from time to time of what the other two, lost plays of his trilogy, might have been like. And my own golden circle of inspiration not once ignored what I had read once as a student in a wonderful essay by Gordon Craig that the actor should appear naked upon the stage. Thus, I decided to film the protagonist shaped out of Prometheus naked. The season in New York was proper towards this endeavour, and I had no difficulty once I had cast the role in either filming the protagonist naked or in the most obvious difficulty, developing the film footage. But of the main characters in the Aeschylus, I only kept three: Prometheus, Poseidon, and Io. Prometheus was cast and in my own being thought of as Prometheus (thought he has no such name in the film proper) was portrayed by Mr Richard Beauvais. Poseidon no longer arriving in a bath tub but riding an exercycle was portrayed by Mr Andy Warhol. And Io not chased by a gadfly, but cast in a kind of subterranean aura, slowly becoming porcelain, and imbued with an Asiatic quality, portrayed by Miss Clara Hoover. Of the three members, I had to film most with Richard Beauvais. Andy Warhol’s footage was shot all in one evening, with Life magazine recording the event in colour stills; the stills have never been published. Clara Hoover’s footage was shot over a period of two or three weeks; a part of the time in below zero weather with Richard Beauvais at Lloyd’s Neck, Long Island.

If the point of inspiration for the three central characters (though in essence Beauvais is the only central character) was Aeschylus’ play, the point of inspiration for the mythic characters, if they be so called, were the Greek myths which had always brought me such jubilation: the myths of Narcissus and Echo, Icarus and Daedalus, Hyacinthus and Apollo, Venus and Adonis, Orpheus and Eyrudice, Zeus and Ganymede, and many others. Using these pointillistically, as illuminated, exotic ports of departure I allowed myself to depart, to drift, to journey amongst the emotions of the players I found during my odyssey: until finally, in the final version of The Illiac Passion, the players become but the molecules of the nude protagonist, gyrating and struggling, all in love, bound and unbound, from situation to situation in the vast sea of emotion which becomes the filmmaker’s proudest endeavour.

One more characterisation should be mentioned as a direct descendant of the two characters who bind Prometheus in the opening passages of the Greek play. The characterisation which I have in mind is that of the inimitable Mr Taylor Mead (underground poet and film personality) who portrays in composite the two characters from Aeschylus: Power and Force. Some film spectators, having seen The Illiac Passion (one dissenting that he was needed in the film!), have looked to him as a sprite, as a fire image; as a fire image because of the costume we selected together for his portrayal. None of these, however, valid as they may seem from the film spectator’s viewpoint, hold as much truth as the filmmaker’s own interpretation: that Taylor Mead is the opposite of the Muse in the film, a Demon; a Demon in the full sense of the Greek word. One has only to think of the film in order to agree to the interpretation. For always, the Demon and the Muse, so deftly portrayed by a true-to-life Muse herself, Mrs Peggy Myrray, are kept apart; apart, that is, they are never seen or superimposed in the same scene or composition together.

(Gregory Markopoulos)

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PORTRAITURE
Sunday 18 April 2004, at 6.20pm
London National Film Theatre NFT2

GALAXIE
Gregory Markopoulos, USA, 1966, 16mm, colour, sound, 92 min

SAINT ACTAEON
Gregory Markopoulos, Italy, 1971, colour, silent, 12 min

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 were 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 up to that point.

In 1964, he began work on 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. 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. A veritable who’s who of the art world in the mid-1960s, Galaxie includes portraits of 33 painters, poets, critics, filmmakers, and choreographers. Shooting with his Bolex camera and utilising 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.

‘The filmmaker resurrected the discipline of making films without post-editing in 1966 when he shot his collection of portraits, Galaxie. In making the portraits his method had been to select an object or an activity with personal significance to the subject. Carefully watching the frame-counter on his camera, he would expose a number of takes of one image interspersed with blackness. He would then rewind the film and expose the units of the next view, detail, or object. Each image has its own metrical pace, which alternates with or is superimposed upon the others.’ (P. Adams Sitney)

Throughout the 1980s, Markopoulos also worked on the Eniaios (1948-91), a series of 22 silent film cycles containing material from his 40 years as a filmmaker. The series was fully edited, but not printed, before his death in 1992. It consists of over 80 hours of film and will cost an estimated $800,000 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 Eniaios. To date, four of the cycles, thirteen hours in total, have been preserved and printed.

In recent years the films of Markopoulos have been gradually reintroduced to the viewing public and have been honoured at major museums and festivals, including retrospectives at the American Centre (Paris 1995), The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York 1996), Pacific Film Archive (San Francisco 1997) The Film Society of Lincoln Centre (New York 2003) and Harvard Film Archive (2003). In May 2003, Robert Beavers and Simon Field presented a screening of Markopoulos films at the Goethe Institute, Athens, to an audience exceeding 350 people, and in June 2004, Temenos Inc. will resume the summer screening programme at the outdoor site in Lyssaraia.

This National Film Theatre season is the first time that so many of the films of Markopoulos have been shown in England on such a scale. Since he withdrew his films from exhibition in the early 1970s, they have been virtually impossible to see in the UK. This high-profile event will also act as a precursor to the resumption of outdoor Temenos projections at a remote site near Arcadia in the Peloponnese in June 2004, where restored films from the epic Eniaios cycle will be presented in public the first time. For three consecutive nights, screenings will take place from 10pm to 4am in the place chosen by Markopoulos as the ideal site for a spectator’s quest, in which his films may elevate the spectators’ sense of time while emotionally and physically connecting them to the mythic themes and locations.

(Mark Webber)

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