This early film by Markopoulos was inspired by an unfinished novella by French poet and novelist Pierre Louÿs, whose sensuous evocations of ancient eroticism set the tone for the filmmaker’s own poetic enterprise. Featuring a musical excerpt from Ralph Vaughan Williams’s "Serenade," the film was made while Markopoulos was studying at the University of Southern California and attending lectures by celebrated filmmaker Josef von Sternberg. Psyche was filmed in and around Los Angeles and the Hollywood Hills with performers chosen for their appearance and for the naturalness of their gestures.

Based on Markopoulos’s modernist reworking of the myth of Hippolytus, in which a chaste youth rejects the incestuous advances of his mother, Phaedre, and is saved from death by a caring physician, Twice a Man was filmed by Markopoulos in and around New York. For Markopoulos, this short feature represented his most elaborate attempt to date to create "a new narrative form through the fusion of the classic montage technique with a more abstract system." The film opens with an extended passage of black leader and the sound of falling rain before plunging into a dazzlingly complex array of interwoven single frames and clusters of images to elaborate a tale of artistic rebirth.

This portrait of the filmmaker's apartment, painted in the color of the title, was made a few months before his departure from New York. It is dedicated to the filmmaker Stan Brakhage and was shot without a scenario and edited entirely in the camera.