{"id":1417,"date":"2004-04-16T18:20:28","date_gmt":"2004-04-16T17:20:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/?p=1417"},"modified":"2018-01-26T11:44:17","modified_gmt":"2018-01-26T11:44:17","slug":"literature-and-myth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/2004\/04\/16\/literature-and-myth\/","title":{"rendered":"Literature and Myth"},"content":{"rendered":"

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LITERATURE AND MYTH
\n<\/strong>Friday<\/strong> 16 April 2004, at 6.20pm
\nLondon National Film Theatre NFT2 <\/strong><\/p>\n

Two contemporary, personal interpretations of classical literature. In Swain<\/em>, an early psychodrama based on Nathaniel Hawthorne\u2019s novel \u2018Fanshawe\u2019, a young man flees from a woman who represents an oppressive sexual identity. Twice A Man<\/em> is a modern adaptation of the myth of Hippolytus, in which a chaste youth rejects the advances of his mother and is saved from death by a caring physician. This film demonstrates a great stylistic leap as Markopoulos introduces single-frame montage and a more elliptical narrative process.<\/p>\n

Gregory Markopoulos, Swain, USA, 1950, 25 min
\nGregory Markopoulos, Twice A Man, USA, 1963, 49 min<\/strong><\/p>\n

The programme will be introduced by Robert Beavers, filmmaker and director of Temenos Inc.<\/p>\n

Also Screening: Sunday 18 April 2004, at 8.40pm, NFT2<\/em><\/p>\nPROGRAMME NOTES<\/a>

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LITERATURE AND MYTH
\n<\/strong>Friday 16 April 2004, at 6.20pm
\nLondon National Film Theatre NFT2<\/p>\n

SWAIN
\nGregory Markopoulos, USA, 1950, 16mm, colour, sound, 25 min<\/strong><\/p>\n

TWICE A MAN
\nGregory Markopoulos, USA, 1963, 16mm, colour, sound, 49 min<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> 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\u2019s quest, in which his films may elevate the spectators\u2019 sense of time while emotionally and physically connecting them to the mythic themes and locations.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> (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<\/em> (1946), he made the film Psyche<\/em> (1947). With Lysis<\/em> and Charmides <\/em>(both 1948), it formed a trilogy titled Du sang de la volupt\u00e9 et de la mort<\/em> (1947-48), an early cinematic representation of homosexual love. In the following years he made a number of films, including Swain<\/em> and Flowers of Asphalt<\/em> (both 1951), in which he refined his technique.<\/p>\n

\u2018Swain<\/em> 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\u2019 (Donald Weinstein)<\/p>\n

In 1954 he destroyed all of his journals and travelled to Greece to start anew. He developed a scenario for the film Serenity<\/em> (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\u2019s 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)<\/em> detailing the film\u2019s troubled eight year long history.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, since 1961, Markopoulos had been working on Twice A Man<\/em> (1963) based on Markopoulos\u2019s 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 \u2018a new narrative form through the fusion of the classic montage technique with a more abstract system.\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

\u2018The protagonist grapples with past, present, and future while pursuing Eros and creativity\u2026 Paul encounters a labyrinth of memories, echoing with colour and pierced by shards of syncopated speech that form a portion of the film\u2019s extraordinary soundtrack.\u2019 (Kristin M. Jones)<\/p>\n

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

(Mark Webber)<\/p>\n

Back to top<\/a><\/p>\n

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Alina Rudnitskaya\u2019s humanistic approach to documentary filmmaking often brings out the humour in her chosen subjects. As an introduction to her work, this programme depicts three diverse groups of contemporary Russian women.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[136,54],"class_list":["post-1417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gregory-markopoulos-2004","tag-gregory-markopoulos","tag-markopoulos"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1417\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}