Galaxie

Gregory J. Markopoulos, Galaxie, 1966, 82 min

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.

The Illiac Passion

Gregory J. Markopoulos, The Illiac Passion, 1964-67, 91 min

One of the masters of American avant-garde filmmaking, Gregory Markopoulos had developed a singular, senses-stunning style – marked by lush, color-saturated visuals; psychologically-charged editing; and a concern with the mythopoeic – when he left the US for good, relocated to Europe, and pulled his films from public exhibition. The gradual re-emergence of his work continues with this rare screening of one of his greatest achievements, a contemporary take on Prometheus Bound. It’s a spectacle of passion and creation in which Aeschylus’ text mixes with the music of Bartók and underground luminaries Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, Taylor Mead, Beverly Grant, Gregory Battcock, and Gerard Malanga are cast as the titans of Greek mythology.

The Pursuit of Wholeness: Gregory Markopoulos 1

Gregory J. Markopoulos, Twice a Man, 1963, 49 min
Georgia Korossi, Devotion, 2017-18, 13 min

The Pursuit of Wholeness pays tribute to seminal avant-garde filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos, with rare 16mm screenings of two of Markopoulos’ most acclaimed films and an exclusive preview of film critic Georgia Korossi’s documentary Devotion, a film that gives precious testimony of the 2016 edition of Temenos, the quadrennial event of screenings of Markopoulos’ monumental Eniaios. Curated by Eleonora Pesci this programme especially focuses on the ongoing, profound bond between the filmmaker’s works and his Greek heritage. It is part of a larger film season, The Pursuit of Wholeness, a National Film & Television School film programme exploring the influences of ancient Greek mythology and archetypes on cinematic quests for sexual and gender identity.

TWICE A MAN
Gregory J. Markopoulos, USA, 1963, 16mm, colour, sound, 49 minutes
Gregory Markopoulos’ Twice a Man re-invents the Greek myth of Hippolytus, killed after rejecting the advances of his stepmother Phaedra. The story is transposed, and deeply transformed, to 1960s New York. Here Paul, a contemporary Hippolytus, envisions fragments of the most relevant relationships in his life: his seductive mother, shown in both a younger and an older version, and his male lover, named the Artist-Physician and representing the creative self. With sharp, richly textured and sensuous colours, the images displaying thoughts and memories of the characters interweave in a brilliantly innovative montage, the point of reference always sinuously shifting from one persona to another and almost evoking an intertwining of identities. (Eleanora Pesci)

DEVOTION
Georgia Korossi, UK, 2017-18, digital, colour, sound, 13 minutes
Since 2004, a three-day long film event has been taking place in Lyssaraia, Arcadia, Greece. The birthplace of Gregory Markopoulos’ father, this remote village in the Peloponnese is the place designated by the late filmmaker as his Temenos, a Greek word originally meaning a sacred piece of land set apart from everyday life use. Here, once every four summers, filmmakers, academics, cinephiles gather for the projection of the cycles of Eniaios, Markopoulos’ definitive, 80-hour long magnum opus, whose full printing is still ongoing and carefully supervised by Robert Beavers. Georgia Korossi’s short documentary Devotion is an insightful and rare visual testimony of the latest edition of this event, which took place in early July 2016. A fascinating pilgrimage, as well as an act of delicate love for the enchanting and fragile work of one of the least known protagonists of avant-garde cinema. (Eleonora Pesci)

Copies of “Film as Film: The Collected Writings of Gregory J. Markopoulos,” which gathers almost 100 texts dating from 1950 to 1992, will be available at the screening.

The Pursuit of Wholeness: Gregory Markopoulos 2

Gregory J. Markopoulos, The Illiac Passion, 1964-67, 91 min
Introduced by Mark Webber

“The players become but the molecules of the nude protagonist, gyrating and struggling, all in love, bound and unbound, from situation to situation in the vast sea of emotion.” Gregory J. Markopoulos)

THE ILLIAC PASSION
Gregory J. Markopoulos, USA, 1964-67, 16mm, colour, sound, 91 minutes
Held as the greatest achievement of Gregory Markopoulos’ American years, The Illiac Passion is a visionary re-writing of Aeschylus’ tragedy Prometheus Bound, but for his modern, erotic odyssey Markopoulos also drew inspiration from several other Greek myths that had always held him “in such jubilation”, like Orpheus and Eurydice and Icarus and Daedalus. Pushing the montage experimentation even further and increasingly focusing on sequences of single frames, the film stars personalities from New York’s 1960s underground scene that are as much mythical as the archetypes they come to play (Andy Warhol, Taylor Mead, Paul Swan, Gerard Malanga and many others). The Illiac Passion perhaps reaches the peaks of its genius with Warhol’s Poseidon making his entrance on scene on an exercise bike and with the soundtrack, a fractured reading of Henry Thoreau’s translation of the ancient tragedy interwoven with excerpts from Béla Bartók’s Cantata Profana and the cries of an eagle.” (Eleonora Pesci)

The Pursuit of Wholeness pays tribute to seminal avant-garde filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos, with rare 16mm screenings of two of Markopoulos’ most acclaimed films and an exclusive preview of film critic Georgia Korossi’s documentary Devotion, a film that gives precious testimony of the 2016 edition of Temenos, the quadrennial event of screenings of Markopoulos’ monumental Eniaios. Curated by Eleonora Pesci this programme especially focuses on the ongoing, profound bond between the filmmaker’s works and his Greek heritage. It is part of a larger film season, The Pursuit of Wholeness, a National Film & Television School film programme exploring the influences of ancient Greek mythology and archetypes on cinematic quests for sexual and gender identity.

Copies of “Film as Film: The Collected Writings of Gregory J. Markopoulos,” which gathers almost 100 texts dating from 1950 to 1992, will be available at the screening.