The new (April 2017) issue of Artforum features a great article on Peter Gidal’s “Flare Out: Aesthetics 1966–2016” and “Shoot Shoot Shoot“, the LUX publication on the first decade of the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative.
Noam M. Elcott‘s review of these two related books ends with the following summary:
“In tone and substance, many of the essays in Flare Out testify to Gidal’s ‘ultra-left’ politics, polemics that were widely criticized and eventually abandoned by most LFMC adherents for their seemingly intractable dogmatism. And yet many of his arguments seem all too timely today. What was once dismissed as a puritanical asceticism at odds with rudimentary aesthetic pleasure seems sensible now, even compulsory, given our ascendant patriarchal politics. [… ] Infamously, Gidal advocated for a moratorium on representations of women on-screen. Perhaps we consider ourselves too enlightened to brook, or the feminist project too far advanced to warrant, such blunt statements – even in the months dominated by the venom of Trump, the vitriol of Bernie Bros, and the broadcast and social media that enabled both. But Gidal’s unfashionably radical feminism deserved more than a second look in the current climate of fashionably virulent patriarchy.”
(Noam M Elcott, “Structural Integrity”, Artforum, March 2017.)
The Visible Press is pleased to announce the following events to celebrate the publication of Film as Film: The Collected Works of Gregory J. Markopoulos. The opening series of screenings on the US East Coast in September & October 2014 provide an opportunity to view most of Markopoulos’ American films, plus those made soon after his move to Europe, and sections of his final work Eniaios. Full details are available on the Events calendar.
Mon 8 Sep – NYC Anthology Film Archives
A Christmas Carol / Du sang de la volupté et de la mort / Christmas USA
Tue 9 Sep – NYC Anthology Film Archives
Sorrows / The Mysteries
Wed 10 Sep – Anthology Film Archives
Bliss / Gammelion
Thur 11 Sep – New Haven Yale University
Christmas USA / Eros, O Basileus / Listening to the Space in My Room (Beavers)
Sat 13 Sep – NYC Anthology Film Archives
Genius (Introduced by P. Adams Sitney)
Tue 16 Sep – NYC Light Industry
Galaxie
Wed 17 Sep – Philadelphia International House
The Illiac Passion
Fri 19 Sep – Cambridge Harvard Film Archive
Bliss / Gammelion / panel discussion (Sitney, Beavers, Webber)
Sat 20 Sep – Cambridge Harvard Film Archive
Himself as Herself / The Dead Ones / Through a Lens Brightly: Mark Turbyfill
Sun 21 Sep – Cambridge Harvard Film Archive
Galaxie (Introduced by Roy Grundmann)
Mon 22 Sep – Cambridge Harvard Film Archive
A Christmas Carol / Du sang de la volupté et de la mort / Christmas USA
Sun 28 Sep – Hudson Basilica
Twice a Man / Through a Lens Brightly: Mark Turbyfill / Ming Green
Sun 28 Sep – Cambridge Harvard Film Archive
Genius / Gilbert and George
Mon 29 Sep – NYC The Kitchen
Discussion of Markopoulos’ Writing / Bliss (Eniaios version)
Mon 6 Oct – Cambridge Harvard Film Archive
Hagiographia II
Robert Beavers and Mark Webber will be present to introduce most of the screenings. Other guests will appear at selected events. Film as Film will be on sale at most venues priced $30.
Coming Soon
9 Oct – Gent University / Courtisane – Mark Webber lecture
10-14 Oct – Brussels Cinematek – 4 programme retrospective
31 Oct – London Tate Modern – Psyche / Bliss / Gammelion
19-24 Nov – Vienna Filmmuseum – 10 programme retrospective
10 Dec – Paris Centre Pompidou – Du sang de la volupté et de la mort
Further events to be announced
Meeting with Peter Gidal
Join us at 80WSE to hear experimental filmmaker, theorist, and writer Peter Gidal discuss his work.
This event is organized on the occasion of Condition of Illusion, a retrospective of the work of Peter Gidal comprised of 16mm films, photographs, and text-based work from 1968 to 2013 alongside new and never-before-seen material.
Flare Out: Aesthetics 1966–2016, an anthology containing fifty years of Gidal’s writings, is still available from The Visible Press.
Markopoulos & Beavers
Gregory J. Markopoulos, Eros, O Basileus, 1967, 49 min
Robert Beavers, Winged Dialogue, 1967/2000, 3 min
Robert Beavers, The Ground, 1993/2001, 20 min
Robert Beavers, Among the Eucalyptuses, 2017, 4 min
Introduced by Robert Beavers
Gregory Markopoulos came into the life of Robert Beavers in New York in 1965, when the latter was just 17. From then on, until the death of the Greek filmmaker in 1992, they shared a life devoted to the cinema. Beavers continues to preserve and present the artistic legacy of Markopoulos by means of The Temenos, a project with a film archive in Switzerland. Screenings of the films of both are an event, as Beavers graces all the screenings with his presence, whether at the singular biannual programme in Lyssarea (Greece) or in cinemas and museums around the world.
The programme opens with Eros, O Basileus, perhaps the best known film of his partner and mentor. The film is the portrait of a lover, a young body that seeks inspiration through touch, with objects. The session goes on to offer a window onto the world and the rich imaginary of Beavers. The Ground is the representation of his interest in landscape. Winged Dialogue is his work on the corporal, where beauty and sexuality are present.
We close with the premiere of the filmmaker’s latest work, Among the Eucalyptuses, a kind of destination on the path traced by this small retrospective. His luminous 16 mm films represent the poetics of intimate domestic spaces and their inhabitants, weaving together rhythms of everyday life and reflections on death.
Galaxie
Gregory J. Markopoulos, Galaxie, 1966, 82 min
Introduced by Robert Beavers
Gregory Markopoulos, one of the most revered and acclaimed of American avant garde filmmakers, decamped for Europe in 1967, and, angry at the state of exhibition, removed his works from distribution in the mid-1970s. To this day, every screening of a Markopoulos movie is an event—and this one is no exception.
Galaxie is among Markopoulos’ supreme achievements: silent save for the chime of a ritual bell, it collects disarming filmed portraits of thirty men and women of the New York art world in the mid-1960s, including W.H. Auden, Susan Sontag, Allen Ginsberg, Shirley Clarke, and Jasper Johns, and pillars of the filmmaking community like Jonas Mekas and the Kuchar brothers, images edited and overlaid in-camera by Markopoulos and his trusty Bolex. A singular celebration of an extraordinary, brilliant, and fiercely uncompromised body of film art.
There will be a second screening of the film on Monday 5 March 2018 at 7:00pm.
