Gregory J. Markopoulos Retrospective in Frankfurt
From 4 to 8 September, Frankfurt based festival exf f. - tage des experimentellen films frankfurt is hosting a four-program retrospective of American experimental filmmaker Gregory J. Markopoulos, one of the most idiosyncratic and influential figures of avant-garde and experimental film in the post-war period. The retrospective was put together in collaboration with Robert Beavers and Francisco Algarín Navarro.
“Gregrory J. Markopoulos, born and raised in Toledo (Ohio) as the son of Greek immigrants, is considered one of the most idiosyncratic and influential figures of avant-garde and experimental film in the post-war period. After shooting his first Super 8 films at the age of just twelve, he studied at USC from 1940 under Joseph von Sternberg, among others, and observed Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock at work. From the early 1960s, he moved to New York, where he played a decisive role in founding the New American Cinema movement, not only as a filmmaker but also as a writer. At the end of the 1960s, however, he radically broke with this movement due to the burgeoning commercialization and in favor of his uncompromising artistic film work in which he aimed for unconditional independence. In 1967, together with his partner Robert Beavers, he preferred to live in exile in Europe, mainly between Greece and Switzerland, in order to devote himself fully to the realization of his vision of filmmaking, albeit under precarious existential conditions. He withdrew all his films from the established distribution channels of the time and largely avoided screenings, which is why his works were rarely shown in public until his death in 1992.
His early films are characterized by an eclectic and idiosyncratic exploration of ancient and modern materials from a wide range of arts and a complex, avant-garde, symbolically charged formal language of color, rhythm and sound. A thematic continuity of many of these films is an imposing, equally conflictual and creative, homoerotic sexuality, which becomes a source for art making. From the late 1960s onwards, Markopoulos developed the idea of “film as film” based on the single frame, which was to concentrate radically on the essential parameters of the medium. This concept takes shape in ENIAIOS, a work lasting over 80 hours and unprecedented in film history, which combines material from earlier works (whose source material he destroyed in the course of editing) and newly shot films. At the same time, Markopoulos developed the idea of Temenos, an archive and screening site that would enable people to encounter his work. After the filmmaker's death, Robert Beavers continued this idea and founded a self-managed archive in Switzerland. The vision of a dedicated venue was taken up in a small Greek village in Arcadia, where Beavers and Markopoulos had already presented their own works in the open air at regular intervals in the 1980s: Since 2004, individual cycles of ENIAIOS have been shown here every four years, the simultaneous restoration and completion of which (Markopoulos only left behind a fragile working copy of the film) Robert Beavers is still responsible for with great effort and dedication together with filmmaker friends.” – exf f. - tage des experimentellen films frankfurt, program overview
Image: Swain (Gregory J. Markopoulos, 1950) | © The Temenos Archive