Excerpts from MAGUS OF MEMORY by Kirk Alan Winslow
Born Giorgios John Markopoulos on 12th March, 1928 in
Toledo, Ohio (died 12th November, 1992 in Frieburg, Germany),
he was the son of Greek immigrants from the Peloponnesus
and spoke only Greek until the age of six. The ancient
legends and orthodox spirituality of that tradition would
prove a grounding matrix for the rest of his life. The
concomitant isolation and displacement he surely felt,
being homosexual and son of foreigners marooned in the
vast American heartland was equally important to his aesthetic
evolution. He could sense the world as a ‚heap of
fragments', intuit life as a ‚perrenial exile.' Having
produced his first 8mm film at the age of twelve, as a
brilliant young high school student he considered pursuing
medical training, with an eye to surgery, but applied
instead to several film production schools, even one in
Russia, finally enrolling at the University of Southern
California, Los Angeles, just at the end of WWII. There,
he attended the master classes of Josef von Sternberg
and was a student-observer to studio productions directed
by emigrés Lang, Hitchcock, Curtiz and Korda. He
also met future Sci-Fi director Curtis Harrington at this
time, sharing with him an interest in the uses of exotic
color and the hypnagogic literature of the ‚poetes
maudits'. He was fascinated by the idea of synesthesia,
the confusion and correspondence between impressions of
different senses that had pre-occupied many Romantic artists,
among them Wagner, Rimbaud and Scriabin.
In 1947 he completed his first important color film Psyche,
inspired by an unfinished Pierre Louÿs novella of
lesbianism. This and two subsequent films made on his
return to Toledo, after only three semesters at USC, formed
a trilogy entitled Du Sang, de la volupté, et
de la mort a profound, platonic/romantic meditation
on the nature of art, emotion and the enigma of homosexuality.
He was no doubt painfully aware at this point that his
ambitious sensibility could be entirely shut out of the
commercial scene by his own high cultural standards and
the unspoken barrier of the ‚gay black list'. But
he had received sustenance from Californian Avant-Garde
circles, where Maya Deren, Sidney Peterson, and Kenneth
Anger were all flourishing in the neo-baroque post-war
American atmosphere receptive to Surrealism and psychoanalysis.
The half-hour long unfinished (and later rediscovered),
silent Markopoulos film The Dead Ones was shot
on outdated Kodak black-and-white Nitrate stock for its
special antique, dreamlike effects, and dedicated to modern
French myth-master Jean Cocteau. In an orphic quest for
redemption, Markopoulos would undergo, like Cocteau's
poet heroes, a symbolic ‚death in the mirror' through
the looking glass of cinema.
In 1950, after filming the oneiric Rain Black, My
Love (later recut and retitled Swain)which
was based on an early Nathaniel Hawthorne story and contained
surprising foreshadowings of his later editing technique,
he embarked on the first of many trips to Europe. (After
many struggles, he would eventually settle there.) In
France, he met and observed Marcel Carné at work.
Returning to the U.S., he found distribution for his films
but was required to abridge Swain. This ‚need'
to excise and rework elaborate cinematic projects was
to become a discouraging refrain in his saga, and served
as a double-edged sword, driving him on to unforeseen
levels of creative compression and invention even as it
consigned countless moments of great beauty to oblivion.
By the mid-Fifties he had completed three more short films
and held an exhibition of his abstract paintings in Toledo
before leaving, undaunted, for Greece, where he would
work for overs six years to bring plans to fruition for
a multi-lingual, 35mm feature film of the Greek immigrant
experience.
Entitled Serenity, it was based on a novel by
Elias Venezis depicting the aftermath of the Greco-Turkish
conflict of 1920-21. Revolving around the symbolic image
of a rose garden, the film was to take place largely in
the memory of its principal female character, the wife
of an idealistic young physician exiled in the postwar
diaspora. Color shooting finally began in 1958, under
trying conditions (some scenes could only be filmed in
one take), with a soundtrack recorded in English, Greek,
German and Russian. A first version was then edited in
Rome. After that a dire, truly Byzantine struggle with
the film's producers ensued that lasted over two years,
exhausting and discouraging the filmmaker. During that
time he continued to work on scenarios, three of which
would be the bases of his major works of the 1960s. A
trucated version of Serenity was finally premiered
at Spoleto in 1961 and a longer edit was shown three times
in the U.S. before disappearing entirely, forfeited by
the director in return for his fee. It has not been seen
since.
At this point work began on what is cetainly Markopoulos's
materpiece, Twice a Man (1963). A personal elaboration
of the Phaedra/Hippolytos/Aesclepius myth, it brought
his various concerns with psychodrama, memory, symbolic
color and intensive montage to a new pitch. The modern
reframing of the story focused on the Byronic melancholy
of the Apollonian demi-god Aesclepius, ‚the artist-physician'
(a stand-in for the filmmaker himself) obsessed with the
image of the doomed prince Hippolytos, whom he is commanded
to revive by the goddess Artemis. Shot in 16mm, with two
assistants, on borrowed camera equipment, with unknowns
Olympia Dukakis and Paul Kilb in the lead roles, the film
was a model of creative economy.
Encouraged by the response to Twice a Man (it
won the Prix Lambert in Belgium in 1963), Markopoulos
embarked on an even more ambitious, synoptic treatment
of the Prometheus myth, entitled The Illiac Passion.
He labored on it for more than three years (1964-67).
Filming with an array of artist-performers picked from
the glamorous New York scene of the time, he nearly realized
a spectacular, three-hour long, triple-format, concentric-image
version that would have far surpassed anything he had
previously attempted in richness and complexity.Again,
financing and crucial time restraints forced him to revise
the work at the last moment, and it was cut for its premiere
to the 90 minute, 16mm version extant.
At this time, Markopoulos lectured widely and wrote extensively
for Jonas Mekas's Film Culture Magazine, publishing both
film reviews and theoretical articles. He became interestd
in the multiple-screen and variable speed projection concepts
that would later fire the ‚expanded cinema' movement.
In early 1966, immediately following the death of his
mother, Markopoulos began using an ingenious and radically
economical method to construct shorter films entirely
in-camera, without subsequent editing.
A single roll of film stock was run back and forth inside
the camera apparatus, while carefully selected passages
of frames were laid down (exposed), sometimes alone, sometimes
super-imposed or fadedin and out, at precise positions
predetermined by the filmmaker. Thus, a new genre of his
film work was born: the ‚portrait'. The ‚sitters'
for these likenesses could be either persons, or individual
places, in whatever vicinity the camera/brain might find
itself on a particular occasion. The first portrait, Ming
Green, was of his own apartment and was executed in
a brief time during his period of mourning. A powerful
mood piece, it uses only the light and color emanating
from the enclosed surroundings and selected objects of
his small, elegantly decorated flat. It evokes, without
the presence of a single ‚living' being, the reality
of a life or lives, passing yet present, persistent, like
a fragrance, reverberating with continued expectation.
Markopoulos began using the new technique more and more,
making numerous portraits while continuing to seek big-budget
support for his other projects. But critical and financial
frustrations grew. In 1967, after an unrewarding winter
as professor of cinematography at the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago, a stint that produced a last attempt
at a peopled epic (The Divine Damnation), the artist
moved definitively, with his lover Robert Beavers, to
Europe. He worked on two television productions in Germany,
then making his base of operations in Zürich, Switzerland.
The key work of this liminal phase of Markopoulos's career
is the severe, sublime Gammelion (1968). In an
extension of the portrait film method, it explored the
‚genius loci' of a single site, an Italian castello
and its environs in Rieti which Markopoulos had intended
from early in the decade to be the setting for his feature-length
adaptation of Julien Graq's Surrealist thriller, ‚Le
Chateau d'Argol'. Again, necessity required the filmmaker
to invent a new form from existng material (in this case
his visual ‚location scouting' notes: short frame
‚snaps' of the palace and its decor). By the use
of fades of varying lengths, the original 200 feet (five
minutes) of 16mm were expanded to fill nearly an hour
of film time. The paced winking or pulsing of images that
had been employed in the brief in-camera films was copiously
varied in the work, as the motionless- or barely sturring-
image clusters are suspended in widening galaxies of black
or white leader. Fragments of music, poetic text (Rilke,
read by the filmmaker) and location sound were mixed to
reinforce the impression that elements were both moving
away and gathering towards each other in time. As P. Adams
Sitney writes, in his towering 1974 study of the American
Avant-Garde, ‚Visionary Film' the new style 'creates
the aura of fiction without elaborating any specific fiction.'
Markopoulos continued in this vein of rich austerity,
in such films as The Olympian (1969), a portrait
of novelist Alberto Moravia, and the fragmentary Hagiographia
(1970), filmed around the old Byzantine monastic churches
at Mistra. Single morsels of frames float rhythmically,
on the border of legibility, in the vast oceans of black.
Time seems to collapse to an edge. Sitney again: ‚...in
these later works the filmmaker continues to regard cinematic
structures as a model of the human mind, but he no longer
accords privileged place to the category of memory within
that model.'
In the last ten years of his life, Markopoulos toiled
over Eniaios, another, and the ultimate, reworking
of his entire earlier film output. It was fully edited
and notated, but left unprinted, at the time of his death.
A completely silent eighty-hour long, epic re-configuration
of his previous works, it contains 100 individual titles
arranged in 22 cycles. Edited in the manner of the later,
black-leader, films, it is to be seen ideally over several
weeks, in a yearly summer-fetival held at the Temenos,
a special open-air cinema theatre dedicated to Markopoulos's
works and those of Robert Beavers.
Markopoulos endeavored to remain and transcend himself,
attempting to balance a legion of antithetical forces:
the rich hallucinatory allusiveness of Romanticism vs.
the unadorned factualness and concrete immediacy of the
Modern; the classical ideals of the eternal and archetypical
vs. the practical discoveries of the surprising, eccentric
and exceptional; the severe nurture of the natural vs.
the shielding articifice of the urbane; the archaic magic
of theater vs. the ‚futuristic' science of media.
Both bound and redeemed by the terms of a fragile, fugitive,
mechanical medium Markopoulos bids us free him and ourselves
by intuiting wholeness in the midst of mere instants,
held fast by the charm of film time. An encounter with
this process is often disconcerting - because one's unconscious
workings are exposed. But it is also bracing, exhilarating-
because one at some point takes a leap of faith in the
destination of the work. The conundrum of the image- as
cipher, snare, mirage or narcotic trap for desire; as
mute witness, dead document, or mere token trace- cedes
ultimately to the ideals of vision as seed, of perception
as illumination, of light as pure joy- a revival of the
moment when we are first surprised by beauty:
‚A soul, rubbing its eyes in the next world' Wedekind
‚Color is Eros' Markopoulos
(The complete text was originally published in the European
Media Art Festival catalogue, Osnabrück 1999.)
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