Gregory J. Markopoulos

Quote:
One of the most vertiginous of Markopoulos’s interior landscape studies, Himself as Herself is based loosely on Balzac’s Séraphita. The film consists of a shimmering, nearly plotless evocation of gender identity in flux, and it contains some of Markopoulos’s most haunting, densely interlaced images. Markopoulos portrays a hermaphrodite body, its movements, postures and gestures or expressions, a study of a highly stylized inner landscape that takes Bresson’s ideals to their ultimate conclusions. This film is dedicated to the American artist Emlen Pope Etting and features a musical excerpt from Poulenc’s “Gloria.”Read More »

Quote:
A modern recreation of the legend of Hyppolytus subtly reveals homosexual and incestual motives among its three protagonists as it mingles reality and memory. Particularly noteworthy is the attempt to portray thoughts and flashes of memory by inserting bursts of single-frame, almost subliminal shots into the main sequence which proceeds in different time and space.Read More »

Quote:
Sorrows, US expatriate director Gregory J. Markopoulos’ 1969 film, shares his earlier films’—Bliss (1966) and Gammelion (1968)—fascination with significant structures and the lives of those who lived in or constructed them.

In the case of Sorrows, the mansion, Villa Tribschen, filmed from the outside and inside, viewed from a cold, frigid landscape, and within with the warmth of furniture, sculpture, art, and windows which provided natural light from all four sides of the house on each level, was built by King Ludwig of Bavaria—most often described as the “mad” king—for the composer Richard Wagner.Read More »

The film is based on the novella by the same name, written by Ilias Venezis and reflects the innermost bitterness of the Asia Minor Disaster. The doctor Dimitris Vellis and his younger wife, Eirini, who come from Asia Minor, settle in Anavyssos, as do many other refugees. Eirini, instead of cultivating foodstuffs – grain, grapevines or garden produce, as the government recommends, prefers to cultivate roses.Read More »

Beavers shot The Hedge Theatre in Rome in the 1980s. It is an intimate film inspired by the Baroque architecture and stone carvings of Francesco Borromini and St. Martin and the Beggar, a painting by the Sienese painter Il Sassetta. Beavers’ montage contrasts the sensuous softness of winter light with the lush green growth brought by spring rains. Each shot and each source of sound is steeped in meaning and placed within the film’s structure with exacting skill to build a poetic relationship between image and sound. (Susan Oxtoby, Toronto International Film Festival)Read More »

Synopsis
Things spin: amusement park rides, a phonograph record. A man wakes, shaves, and takes a phone call. Another man, in a kimono, walks in the woods, stops, and opens a small decorative box on the forest floor. People at an amusement park called Little Harlem enjoy themselves. A man walks through another amusement park, called Cavalcade Worlds, as midway rides spin. At a house, an older woman cleans; a pre-teen girl sets the table; a teenaged boy showers. After he dresses, he holds a candle high above his head and walks swiftly toward a young man standing bare-chested, his arms extended. A man arrives home where the girl has set the table. The youth sleeps. Christmas?Read More »

Quote:
In early spring of 1966, in anticipation of his eventual departure from the Greenwich Village apartment in which he had been living for a number of years, [Markopoulos] filmed the revelatory seven-minute interior portrait Ming Green , titled for the deep spruce color of the apartment’s walls. Ming Green was edited entirely in-camera, and its precise rhythmic blossoming is based on overlapping dissolves and longer flashes, rather than single-frame clusters. The film’s complex harmonic structure, however — as well as its incorporation of often static, “single” images that may be comprised of more than one frame — echoes the montage techniques developed in Twice a Man (1963). Interweaving mementos with foliage, color, and light, Ming Green suggests the inextricability of past and present: despite its exquisite lightness, it could represent the passage of hours and days rather than minutes. -Kristin Jones, Millennium Film Journal, 1998Read More »