Alexander Horwath on Film as Film

Alexander Horwath is the director of the Österreichisches Filmmuseum, where a major retrospective of films by Gregory J. Markopoulos will be presented from 19-24 November 2014. See here for details of the programme on the Filmmuseum website.

   “In 1955, roughly at mid-point between now and when cinema began, the 27-year-old filmmaker Gregory J. Markopoulos summoned the names of Griffith, Ince, Stroheim, Eisenstein, Murnau, Sternberg and Dreyer in a lecture titled “The Responsibility of the Cinema In Our Age”. This lineage is not a marginal aspect in the supremely important body of personal film work signed by Markopoulos, nor in his writings that are now available in a beautiful and far-reaching collection. It isn’t a marginal aspect because there is only one cinema – and neither Vertov nor Hitchcock, let’s say, nor Markopoulos can be separated from it. In order for the practice (and the genius) of cinema to be understood in the future, we should cease from splitting off some of the medium’s core achievements into segregated ‘special domains’. The validity of such rubrics and handicaps, mostly invented and held up by commercial or academic interests, will pass into oblivion faster than celluloid itself.
   “All who have dreamed of a single library shelf where the collected writings of cinema’s great practitioners can stand side-by-side – Claire Denis next to Alexander Dovzhenko, Kubelka next to Keaton, Weerasethakul next to Welles – should be extremely grateful that now, right next to the spot reserved for Mizoguchi, Book Number One is finding its place on that shelf. Film as Film, with its contents ranging from critical essays to poetry – all part of an autobiography – is not just a great read for anyone interested in film as an art form … It’s also a double inspiration: to young artists who are just beginning to test their respective tools, training their eyes, ears, hands and machines on the world to achieve something beyond imitation; as well as to those who have not yet seen enough of the actual films made by Gregory J. Markopoulos. To quote the title of one of his masterpieces: this book is the Galaxie of Markopoulos moments, ninety-one intense spotlights from the artist’s life as a writer.”
—– Alexander Horwath

Film as Film; The Collected Writings of Gregory J. Markopoulos is available for purchase at the Austrian Film Museum, priced 25 Euros.

Luke Fowler on Film as Film

Luke Fowler reflects on Markopoulos’ films and writings ahead of the event at Tate Modern, London, next Friday.

“Gregory Markopoulos has been in my thoughts since his masterpiece Bliss inspired me to pick up a Bolex camera several years ago. This book collects many of Markopoulos’ strident and inspirational writings providing a wealth of experiences and provocations for future filmmakers and scholars everywhere. This publication, as well as the monumental Temenos screenings in Greece, will help to establish Markopoulos as one of the single most important filmmakers of the American avant-garde.”
—– Luke Fowler

Psyche, Bliss and Gammelion will be projected at the event on 31 October 2014. The films will be interspersed with readings from Film as Film: The Collected Writings of Gregory J. Markopoulos, which will be available for purchase throughout the event.

Rebekah Rutkoff’s review of “Film as Film” is now online at Bookforum.

“The full and varied spectrum of Markopoulos’s modes of composition and expression (including poetic prose, spiritual anthem, aphorism, diatribe, manifesto) on display in Film as Film is not simply an annex to his filmmaking; it is an integral and inseparable component of the filmmaker’s creation. For the first time, readers can behold, in great personal and historical detail, the steady unfurling of his remarkable vision-in-formation and respond.”

Tacita Dean on Film as Film

“It feels apposite that the writings of Gregory Markopoulos be published now at a time when the very existence of film is so threatened. Nothing more should be needed as a convincing argument that film is still the important, autogenic magical medium for filmmakers today, as it was for Markopoulos, than his text Correspondences of Smell and Visuals. Here one bears witness to the exuberance of a work and a process in the making, brought about, as so often is the case, by both the glories and internal rigours of the medium of film itself. Exciting, too, to feel the fire in his writing, and experience through it a contemporary account of the establishment of the New American Cinema.”
—– Tacita Dean