Gregory J. Markopoulos is acknowledged as one of the pioneers of independent filmmaking. Born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1928, he became a key figure in the New York avant-garde film scene of the 1950s and 60s, co-founding the New American Cinema Group alongside Jonas Mekas, Robert Frank, Peter Bogdanovich and others. Markopoulos’ films, which often translated literary or mythological sources to a contemporary context, are celebrated for their extraordinary creativity, the sensuous use of colour and innovations in cinematic form. His many film portraits feature significant figures in the arts such as David Hockney, Rudolph Nureyev, Leonor Fini, Alberto Moravia, Gilbert and George, Susan Sontag, Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Thek and W.H. Auden. At the end of the 1960s, he left the USA for Europe and began to withdraw his work – including the landmark films Psyche (1947), Twice a Man (1963), Galaxie (1966) and The Illiac Passion (1967) – from circulation. He ultimately re-edited his entire output into the 80-hour epic Eniaios (1947-91), which remained unprinted during his lifetime. Following the death of Markopoulos in 1992, his work has slowly returned to the public arena through events with institutions including the American Museum of the Moving Image, Pacific Film Archive, New York Film Festival and Documenta 12. The Whitney Museum presented a complete retrospective in 1996. Since 2004, premieres of the restored units of Eniaios have taken place every four years at a site in rural Arcadia that was chosen by the filmmaker. These unique events have been reviewed in Artforum, Frieze, Film Comment and other important periodicals. Texts by Markopoulos, which were originally printed in journals such as Film Culture, Filmcritica and Cantrills Filmnotes, or gathered in self-published anthologies and limited edition brochures, are now being made available again in Film as Film: The Collected Writings of Gregory J. Markopoulos. www.thetemenos.org

Film as Film: The Collected Writings of Gregory J. Markopoulos
Edited by Mark Webber
The Visible Press, 2014

Introduction
Film as Film: An Introduction, Mark Webber

Foreword
Markopoulos Writings, P. Adams Sitney

I: Cinema, The Ideal (An Exposition)
The Responsibility of the Cinema in Our Age, c.1955
Cinema The Ideal, 1960
Sto Palikari, 1968
Towards a Constructive Complex in Projection, 1968
A Supreme Art in a Dark Age, 1971
Dante Present, 1971
Inherent Limitations, 1966
The Pyramid of Sight, 1986
The Intuition Space, 1973

II: Avant-Garde Chronicle (On Films & Filmmakers)
A Part of the Alphabet, 1961
Overtime, 1961
Avant-Garde Chronicle, 1963
Projection of Thoughts, 1964
Judgement Through Bad Conscience, 1965
What Are You Ready For?, 1965
Institutions Customs Landscapes, 1966
The Golden Poet, 1962
Scorpio Rising, 1963
Innocent Revels, 1964
Three Filmmakers, 1964
Stille Nacht, 1961
Jean Genet’s Only Film: Un chant d’amour, 1961
Film of the Absurd, 1962
Negatives, 1968
Robert Bresson: A Brief Survey, 1962
The Marvels and Lamentations of Mizoguchi, 1968

III: Disclosed Knowledge (On Markopoulos)
L’Arbre aux champignons, 1950
Psyche’s Search for the Herb of Invulnerability, 1955
A Note for Hans Van Manen, 1971
Bruised by the Critics, 1966
Whither Motion Pictures, 1985
From Fanshawe to Swain, 1966
Statement Concerning Cinema, 1963
Towards a New Narrative Film Form, 1963
Twice a Man Statement, 1965
The Driving Rhythm, 1966
Twice a Man, Three Time Prize Winner, 1966
Galaxie, 1966
The Filmmaker as Physician of the Future. 1967
A Note (for Jean-Paul Vroom), 1971
The Divine Attributes, 1970
Correspondences of Smell and Visuals, 1967
Towards a New Sound Complement for Motion Pictures, 1967
Adventures with Bliss in Roma, 1967
The Adamantine Bridge, 1968
Disclosed Knowledge, 1970
Rebus, 1970
The Redeeming of the Contrary, 1971
The Celestial Inheritance, 1971

IV: The Threshold of the Frame (On Robert Beavers)
10th of July, 1967
The Siege of Bruxelles, 1968
Circumbendibus Notes, 1968
“And I Shall Pull Things From the Stars”, 1972
From First Creative Steps Forward, 1971
The Language of Diamonds, 1970
Love’s Task, 1971
In Other Words It Is His Tongue, 1971
Art Is Not Knowledge, 1973
The Threshold of the Frame, 1974
Clarity Upon Clarity Through Reflection, 1974
The Gathering of Perception and Judgement, 1974
Erb and Tree, 1975
Πνοιη (Pnoee), 1976

V: Towards a Temenos (On Temenos)
Formal Account, 1970
Towards a Temenos, 1970
A Solemn Pause, 1971
The Filmmaker’s Perception in Contemplation, 1972
The Complex Illusion, 1972
Element of the Void, 1972
Towards a Complete Order, 1974
The Usury of the Creative Soul, 1976
Ηρακλής (Heracles), 1978
Εικόνες Αυτών (Ikones Auton), 1979
Προνώπιον (Pronopion), 1980
Ένθεος (Entheos), 1980
Aei!, 1981
Mosholibano, 1981
The Silk Road, 1982
The Ancient Future, 1983
Proposal to the Architect of the Temenos, 1984
The High Tableland, 1984
Ανάλαμψις (Analampsis), 1985
Message for D. W. Griffith, 1985
Hues Point, 1985
Αεί Καλόν (Aei Kalon A), 1985
Αεί Καλόν (Aei Kalon B), 1985
The Amygdaline Grove, 1986
The Bread of Angels, 1987
Unification of the Frame, 1990
The Future of the Temenos and its Boundaries, 1992
Ακρόπολης γης (Acropolis Gis), 1992

Images
16 pages of colour and black & white images
including film stills, production photos and archive materials

Endnotes

Appendix I: Filmography of Gregory J. Markopoulos

Appendix II: Publications supervised by Gregory J. Markopoulos

Alphabetical Index of Titles

Film as Film: The Collected Writings of Gregory J. Markopoulos
Edited by Mark Webber
The Visible Press, 2014

Gregory J. Markopoulos  (1928-92) is acknowledged as one of the pioneers of independent and avant-garde cinema. His films, which include Twice a Man (1963), Ming Green (1966), The Illiac Passion (1967) and Eniaios (1947-91), are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris) and the Austrian Film Museum (Vienna). www.thetemenos.org

Mark Webber is a film curator based in London, who has been responsible for major screening events or touring programmes hosted by institutions such as Tate Modern, LUX and ICA (London), Whitney Museum (New York), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Kunsthalle Basel, Oberhausen Kurzfilmtage, IFFR Rotterdam and many international festivals, museums and art centres. He was a programmer for the BFI London Film Festival from 2000-12, and is the editor of Two Films by Owen Land. www.markwebber.org.uk

P. Adams Sitney is a Princeton University professor and widely published critic. His Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, first published by Oxford in 1974, remains the definitive historical text on the subject. He is also the author of Modernist Montage, Vital Crises in Italian Cinema, Eyes Upside Down, and The Cinema of Poetry (forthcoming, including a chapter on Markopoulos), and editor of The Film Culture Reader, The Essential Cinema, and The Avant-Garde Film.

Film as Film: The Collected Writings of Gregory J. Markopoulos
Edited by Mark Webber
The Visible Press, 2014

The opening paragraphs of the introduction to Film as Film, written by the book’s editor Mark Webber :-

In the Spring of 1980, Gregory Markopoulos travelled through Europe en route to Athens for a screening of one of his most celebrated works at the prestigious National Gallery. This was to be the first Greek presentation of The Illiac Passion (1964-67), a contemporary interpretation of Prometheus made in New York at the height of Markopoulos’ reputation as one of cinema’s leading innovators. Unfortunately, the projection never took place. The event was cancelled following discussions between the museum director and his advisory board who were concerned by mentions of nudity contained in the programme notes the filmmaker had sent in advance of his arrival. This experience set Markopoulos on a journey deep into the province of Arcadia, his ancestral homeland, where he would discover a remote location that he believed was the ideal setting for his work.

One of the few Markopoulos films to have been shown in Greece up to this point was Psyche, his first 16mm film, in 1955. It had been made in Los Angeles in 1947, concurrent with the debuts of his acquaintances Kenneth Anger and Curtis Harrington. As a USC student in the late 1940s, Markopoulos was fortunate to attend lectures by Joseph von Sternberg, and to watch directors Jules Dassin, Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang at work, but he soon grew disillusioned with the conventions of film education. Returning to his hometown of Toledo, Ohio, he continued his filmmaking and began to develop his notions of colour, composition and editing. From there, he visited Paris, where he made contact with literary figures such as André Gide and Jean Cocteau, observed Marcel Carné on set, and met with Jean-Luc Godard (who, as a young film enthusiast, asked Markopoulos to sponsor his first visit to the USA). From 1953 to 1961, he laboured on Serenity, based on a novel by Elias Venezis. This was the closest that Markopoulos came to completing a 35mm feature film. It was a traumatic process that ended when, in order to recover his fee, Markopoulos was forced to abandon the project and surrender the film materials to the investors. The experience was a defining one, reinforcing his belief that for a film to be an artistic statement, true to its maker’s vision, then it had to be made free from financial constraints and expectations.

By the time Markopoulos settled in New York in 1960 he was already known as one of the foremost practitioners of avant-garde cinema. He was closely involved in establishing the New American Cinema Group and Film-Makers’ Cooperative, both led by Jonas Mekas, and helped foster a movement that blossomed into an international explosion of personal filmmaking. As an active participant in the film community, he regularly contributed to film journals and encouraged other filmmakers (including Tom Chomont, Storm De Hirsch, Nathaniel Dorsky and Warren Sonbert) to pursue their art. His two major works of the period, Twice a Man (1963) and The Illiac Passion, both adapted from Greek mythology, employed a fragmented editing style that radicalised narrative construction. With Galaxie and Ming Green (both 1966) he created a new form of cinematic portraiture, editing and building complex layers of superimposition entirely in-camera at the moment of filming.

As the end of the decade approached, Markopoulos grew increasingly unhappy with the conditions in which films were being exhibited, critical interpretations of the work, and the semi-commercial support structures that had developed within the film scene. His dedication to film, and his frustration at the way it was treated by the cultural establishment, was such that he later withdrew his work from circulation, placing it entirely within his own control and choosing a path that would distinguish him from all filmmakers that had gone before. Leaving the USA for good in 1968, he spent the rest of his life in Europe together with his partner, the filmmaker Robert Beavers, travelling, filming, and making plans for a unique monographic archive for the preservation, presentation and study of their work.

Mark Webber