![]() Locating and clearing a remote woodland site outside of the mountain village of Lyssarea- Markopolous’s father’s hometown, 100 miles west of Athens in the middle of the Peloponnese-Markopoulos and Beavers began a series of outdoor screenings of their 16mm films in 1980. Second, this break drove Markopoulos’s vision for the Temenos, a space apart from the demands and strictures of not only the commercial cinema-what he called “a constant confusion of purposeless information”-but the emergent independent model as well. First, Markopoulos’s body of work became very difficult to access-even (or especially) now, as it remains a celluloid-specific corpus that is wholly unassimilable to the new digital economy of the moving image and its illusions of 24/7 access. The results of this break, however, were significant. (Markopoulos lasted only two semesters teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.) Moreover, once finished, his films faced censorship for their depictions of male nudity and queer coupling, and worse: the usual chilly reception to an artist working entirely in his own lane. Then, as now, the work of an experimental filmmaker necessitated either personal wealth, institutional support, or an academic appointment. (The 2002 edition of Visionary Film reinstates the chapter, with permission from Beavers and the Markopoulos estate.) The precise reasons for this break are many and opaque, but they hinged on his struggles to make films independently, and to find a receptive audience for them. Increasingly dissatisfied with the conditions for making and exhibiting work in the U.S., Markopoulos left for Europe in 1967, eventually cutting ties with his birth country, renouncing his affiliation with Anthology Film Archives, halting the distribution of his new films, and even requesting that Sitney excise the chapter on him from future editions of his book. Adams Sitney’s field-defining 1974 study of the American avant-garde, Visionary Film. ![]() ”) His films had also inspired a steadily growing body of critical writing on independent experimental filmmaking, and were notably the subject of a chapter, “From Trance to Myth,” in P. (This early work includes 1963’s Twice a Man, which screens at Film at Lincoln Center this weekend and next week as part of the series “ New York, 1962–1964: Underground and Experimental Cinema. By then, Markopoulos had built an already substantial corpus of more than 20 films, which ranged in mode from intensely personal, mythopoetic psychodrama to intensely intimate, expressionist moving-image portraiture. By the early 1970s, Markopoulos had for more than a decade been a central figure in the American avant-garde, having helped to found the New American Cinema Group and Film-Makers’ Cooperative, both under the direction of Jonas Mekas. ![]() ![]() Markopoulos had something like this in mind when he conceived of an exhibition space and archive for his work and that of his partner, Robert Beavers, which he called the Temenos. As linked to Asclepius, god of medicine, the temenos also functioned as a place of healing and restoration, where the sick would consult with the oracles in whose dreams and trances they would find cures for their afflictions.įilmmaker Gregory J. Image courtesy of Temenos.Ī temenos, as conceived by the ancient Greeks, was a sanctuary, a sacred grove demarcated from the rest of the forest as a place of asylum, protecting what is within it and excluding what is outside. Robert Beavers and Gregory Markopoulos at the Temenos site, 1980. This article appeared in the Jedition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing.
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