Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives
GREGORY J. MARKOPOULOS: FILM AS FILM
September 8 – September 13
“There is no language. There is no art. There is no knowledge. There is but film as film: the beginning and the eternal moment.” –Gregory Markopoulos, “The Intuition Space”
Gregory J. Markopoulos (1928-92) is one of the most original filmmakers to emerge from the post-war avant-garde. His films, which often translated literary or mythological sources to a contemporary context, are celebrated for their extraordinary creativity, the sensuous use of color, and innovations in cinematic form. A co-founder of the New American Cinema Group, Markopoulos was actively involved in nurturing New York’s film community before moving to Europe at the end of the 1960s to pursue a more individual path. Firmly believing that a filmmaker should be responsibility for all aspects of his work, he developed the idea of Temenos, a monographic archive for the preservation, presentation, and study of his films.
In parallel to his filmmaking, Markopoulos was a prolific writer whose articles were circulated in journals, self-published editions, or program notes. This screening series celebrates the publication of “Film as Film: The Collected Writings of Gregory J. Markopoulos,” a new book that gathers together some ninety out-of-print or previously unavailable texts by the filmmaker. See www.thevisiblepress.com for more information on the book, and for details of additional events at Light Industry, The Kitchen, Harvard Film Archive, and elsewhere this fall.
This is an extremely rare opportunity to see Markopoulos’s earliest works, shown alongside some of the first films made in Europe following his departure from the US in 1967. Robert Beavers and Mark Webber (editor of “Film as Film”) will be present and the book will be available for purchase at the screenings.
Very special thanks to Robert Beavers and Mark Webber. For more information regarding Temenos, visit www.the-temenos.org.
