“Film as Film” reviewed in Artforum

Erika Balsom has written a wonderful article on Gregory J. Markopoulos and “Film as Film” for the March 2015 issue of Artforum. The conclusion is below, but you can read the full article online at www.artforum.com.

“The cultic aura that surrounds Markopoulos is intense, and Film as Film does little to diffuse it. Sometimes it can feel as if Markopoulos’s edict regarding the behavior of the ideal spectator remains in force today. In making available texts that had been exceedingly difficult to access, this collection represents a tremendous primary resource that at last illuminates a central personality of experimental cinema. But this is not a book that seeks to challenge the narrative that this sometimes self-mythologizing filmmaker crafted about himself. Markopoulos believed that unquestioning devotion was the best way to honor the creator, but critical perspectives are important as well. In addition to facilitating access to this material, one of the great contributions of Film as Film is its implicit demonstration of the need for further scholarship that will place Markopoulos’s films and writings in conversation with historical realities and differing points of view.”

Erika Balsom, excerpt from “Future Projections”, Artforum, March 2015

“Film as Film” reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement

The current issue of the Times Literary Supplement contains a full page review of “Film as Film” written by David Collard”. The article appears in the print edition dated 23 January 2015, and is only available to view online by subscribers.

“Markopoulos was a prolific if rather unpolished writer but this substantial volume, which is beautifully illustrated and impeccably edited, shows his writings are consistently absorbing. Although they tend increasingly towards the grandiose and metaphysical, they thankfully avoid the arid theoretical discourse that surrounds experimental film.”

Erratum: The opening paragraph contains a few factual errors. Markopoulos moved from the US to Europe in 1967-68 (not 1972), and it is not true that he refused to do interviews – many appeared in journals and newspapers, or on European radio and television broadcasts.

Jonas Mekas on Markopoulos

A previously unpublished diary entry by Jonas Mekas has been published by The Brooklyn Rail to run alongside Markopoulos’ important essay “Towards a Complete Order” (1974). In this text, Markopoulos writes about the moment in which he decides to re-edit his entire body of work into what became Eniaios. “… the prints that now exist have become but work prints, a fitting jest to the speculators of my work, known and unknown.”

Jonas Mekas was one of Markopoulos’ most faithful and enthusiastic supporters. In his diary entry, which dates from 1965, Mekas recalls Markopoulos’ extraordinary and assured method of editing – “Gregory was editing, with film strips hanging down from the ceiling to the floor, so that the south side of his room looked like a willow tree …” – perfectly describing the photograph by Jerome Hiler that appears on the cover of Film as Film.

These articles appear in the Dec/Jan print issue of The Brooklyn Rail but are also online here.

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