Film as Film: The Collected Writings of Gregory J. Markopoulos
Edited by Mark Webber, with a foreword by P. Adams Sitney
The Visible Press, September 2014

Film as Film: The Collected Writings of Gregory J. Markopoulos contains some ninety out-of-print or previously unavailable articles by the Greek-American filmmaker who, as a contemporary of Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage and Andy Warhol, was at the forefront of a movement that established a truly independent form of cinema. Beginning with his early writings on the American avant-garde and auteurs such as Dreyer, Bresson and Mizoguchi, it also features numerous essays on Markopoulos’ own practice, and on films by Robert Beavers, that were circulated only in journals, self-published editions or programme notes. The texts become increasingly metaphysical and poetic as the filmmaker pursued his ideal of Temenos, an archive and screening space to be located at a remote site in the Peloponnese where his epic final work could be viewed in harmony with the Greek landscape. Gregory J. Markopoulos (1928-1992) is a unique figure in film history, whose life’s work stands in testament to his strength of vision and commitment to the medium.

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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

Filmography of Gregory J. Markopoulos

A Christmas Carol, 1940, 5 min
Du Sang, de la volupté et de la mort, 1947-48, 59 min
  inc.  Psyche, 1947, 24 min
          Lysis, 1948, 25 min
          Charmides, 1948, 11 min
Christmas U.S.A., 1949, 13 min
The Dead Ones, 1949, 29 min (unfinished)
Jackdaw, 1950, 14 min (no longer extant)
L’arbre aux champignons, 1950, unfinished (no longer extant)
Swain, 1950, 20 min
Flowers of Asphalt, 1951, 7 min
Father’s Day, 1952, 6 min (unfinished)
Eldora, 1953, 11 min
Serenity, 1961, unfinished (no longer extant)
Twice a Man, 1963, 46 min
Rushes for ‘The Illiac Passion’, c.1964, 12 min
The Death of Hemingway (An Obituary Fantasy), 1965, 12 min
Galaxie, 1966, 82 min
Ming Green, 1966, 7 min
Test with Masks for ‘The Illiac Passion’, 1966, 3 min
Eros, o Basileus, 1967, 49 min
Himself as Herself, 1967, 60 min
Through a Lens Brightly: Mark Turbyfill, 1967, 14 min
Bliss, 1967, 6 min
The Illiac Passion, 1964-67, 91 min
The Divine Damnation, 1968/72, 57 min
Gammelion, 1968, 54 min
The Mysteries,1968, 64 min
(A)lter (A)action, 1968, 65 min
Der Schachtel, 1968, 29 min
Index – Hans Richter, 1969, 23 min
The Olympian, 1969, 23 min
Political Portraits, 1969, 70 min
Sorrows, 1969, 6 min
Alph, 1970, 15 min
Genius, 1970, 60 min
Hagiographia (first version), 1970, 60 min
Moment, 1970, 6 min
Cimabue! Cimabue!, 1971, 80 min
Doldertal 7, 1971, 6 min
Saint Acteon, 1971, 9 min
35, Boulevard General Koenig, 1971, 8 min
Hagiographia (second version), 1973, 60 min
Heracles, 1973, running time unknown
Meta, 1973, running time unknown
Prosopographia, 1976, 5 min (unfinished)
ENIAIOS, 1947-91, circa 80 hours

For access to film prints for screenings or research, please contact Temenos.

Please note that the information on this page has been revised since the book was pubished, and several running times have been amended.

The Complex Illusion

From here biding my Time in Waiting, the Temenos of the Twenty-First Century is being borne aloft, first in the imagination of Decision, and then by Force towards its vital Realization, built stone by stone, girder by girder, stitch by stitch, in the Peloponnesus where ancient Arcadia Acknowledges the distant sea. Two spaces, individual in Determination between a precinct sacred to the haunt of doves. Inexplicably through Belief it will rise to safeguard its precious catalogue of films: the supreme work of Beavers and Markopoulos.

Day by day I have often risen in the morning to the tinkling bells of the two herds of cows that partake of their drinking in the square below. Slowly they approach, wait, sometimes askance, and then dip their mouths into the cool waters, once at dawn, and once at dusk; and ever the waters of the fountain run strong, even through the Night.

From village to village, I have walked with some incalculable Hope that the Temenos site might be here in the Graubünden, but though the mountains speak in their marvellous summaries to the Alps, nowhere do I find the spirit that is Greece. Missing are the vibrant, uncanny, showered aeons that are Greece; that is the Eros in Time; and the triumphant face of the peasant of the Peloponnesus. Where indeed do you come from?

Speak, Soul, that is the haunt of doves! The names of the proposed sites are Rayi Spartias and Founta: where one Summer’s afternoon I wandered not knowing their names, and beheld a navy blue expanse in the distance, and dust, and more Dust! A lone Greek peasant sat at one crook in the road and waved to me asking whose son I was – then replied for all his years, “The son of Marko!”

Perhaps, I should have proceeded beyond the central point which many months later I was told was called Founta, but I stopped fearing my uncle would be upset at my disappearance.

Writing this, this glorious afternoon, without a penny to my name, I know that the depth of the Markopoulos space will harbour a screen enveloping the film spectator of the future. Once, I believe it was in 1958, Iconsidered the projected area of film might be peered down into, rather than stared at; this was while at the theatre in Delphi. The question is how to subscribe to the sound; it must perforce emerge from some subterranean element; and the audience must experience a visual incubation such as in the ancient temenoi where the patient was visited by the illusions of his malady.

In the Temenos the visual incubation shall be the metaphysical journey, therefore, Destiny of the film spectator of the future. The film spectator of the future who will benefit from the physical and historical lapse of time which will then be the presentation of film as film shall necessarily Experience the content of the various works from the integral catalogue of films. He will experience the Content because Time itself will have vanquished the entertainment film as such; what of the entertainment film will have survived? The content that critics in their deliberate and faithless sleep during this crucial moment in the rise of film ignore or forbear to recognize will in the Temenos culminate as Speech: the Speech of Images. Time itself with the aid of projection in orchestration will issue a wondrous Content almost mythical and musical, and above all, Elevating for the film spectator of the future.

If at this precise second Beavers is editing his martyrdom footage (based on the St. Hippolytus altar piece in Boston, Massachusetts), section after section, foot after foot, panel after panel, and developing it with the merging of cracked glass, the Bern square, and the dust imagery, what indeed will it become at the Temenos presentations of the Beavers reflecting space? The film spectator of the future in the Beavers reflecting space will not only meet the long lost shadow, but he will welcome as if in an Assumption, his, the film spectator’s loss of faith; a loss of faith due to boredom, freedom, and sensuality. The regained recognition of the film as film, and more particularly, the Temenos Catalogue of Films of Beavers and Markopoulos, become immortal through the sacrifice of these filmmakers and the film spectators of the future will inevitably summarize what will become the very epic scheme, the future scheme of film as film; that is Itself! Today’s history of film is but a constant confusion of purposeless information.

It is, thus, for Skill that I Call! but above all for Courage; not only for myself, but for all those others who in Mighty Hand will help me build the Temenos. May it be as I saw the mountains with Beavers some days ago from Ftan in the sacred Peloponnesus; the Temenos present and not present in its appearance; the presentations purposeful for the future. Mountains close to the surface of Alps: God Plan. Architect and Mighty Hand Waken!!!

16th of May, 1972
Bad Scuol

The Responsibility of the Cinema in Our Age

Today, the Cinema is still in its infancy. That is to say, that even with the monumental technical achievements in the mechanics of Cinema, we still lack a true form of Cinema. We lack a film form.

The Cinema began as a representative of the photograph, and as a representative of the Theatre. From the beginning until today it has been chaos. In the beginning there was fruitlessness in the attempts of the very early film creators as to how to utilize the monster known as the camera; for the camera is truly a monster. In reality the camera is the black spirit of Cinema, and the film creator must learn to anticipate its every attempt to dominate the original IDEA during the production of a film.

With this Cyclops of the one eye, the early film creators, such as the great Griffith, Ince, and later Stroheim, Eisenstein, and much later von Sternberg, Murnau and Dreyer gave us a sense of what film form might become. They each gave us, according to their own individual tastes, a sense of the well proportioned, and the well composed film image. But within this film image there were obviously people who had to move, to play-act, and there it seems to me the Cinema has remained to this day.

Of course, sound was born, and the various types of screens came into existence, but these have not helped the Cinema. The pictures are becoming continuously larger, and the sound continuously louder. The appeal is to the appendage eye and ear; not to the heart which as Schiller said, “Gives Grace To Every Art.”

For me, the Cinema lacks a soul, a psyche. It is no longer necessary to make films from ordinary adaptations and cheap novels. We have the urgent themes of a universal world and of our own era to present upon the screen; and, for each of these, the Cinema needs a particular form of presentation.

On the stage the actor’s movements are exaggerated to give the distant meaning which is assumed takes place between the actor and the Theatre spectator. It is said that the Theatre is intimate. It is not. There is nothing more distant than the Theatre spectator, and especially the Theatre spectator of today, and the actor. The actor as IDEA. And yet, in the Cinema which is so often accused of not being intimate, yet it is intimate, there is the focus of attention between the film image and the eye of the spectator. In fact the focus of attention is so great, that if used properly, and according to a set of rules proper to each individual film creator’s purpose, the Cinema can reach the very seat of the film spectator’s psyche.

If in the Theatre the parts of the body are used by the actor for exaggerated purposes, in the Cinema the parts of the body should be utilized by the film creator to reveal the action. The film creator if he wishes to use an eye, must not only use the eye, but the parts of the eye. If the lips are to be used, the features of the lips themselves should be utilized. If it is a matter of smiling, it must not only be the smile which is utilized, but the very parts which make up the smile. Further, if it is a matter of running, jumping, walking, slipping, dancing, each part must be related to the film creator’s original IDEA. The original IDEA in a given film work must be consistent in the words, if words are used, in the coeval use of sound, in the use of the proper lens, in the need for music, and even in the lesser uses of costumes and sets; both interior and exterior.

Each film creator must be morally responsible for his work, whether it be narrative, lyrical, or epic. Film creators must create for the world they live in, and from which they perceive each work. The danger in any work lies in the fact that the creator believes only in himself.

For me, personally, the Cinema is music; is music with its contrapuntal elaborations. Cinema is the noble metaphysical Art of our age, and of our one world without boundaries. Cinema can show us in what aspects we differ from one another, and in what aspects we remain the same. Cinema can draw nations together, and dissolve boundaries between groups of men. Lastly, Cinema is the representative of Life which no other Art can give us, so truly.

This text was delivered as a lecture at a meeting of the Nea Estia Society, Athens, 21st of December, 1955.