Gregory Markopoulos (1928-1992) was one of the true visionaries of the post-WWII American avant garde. Across his exquisitely stylized, oneiric early films and through his dazzling master works of the late Sixties and Seventies, Markopoulos defined a unique film language of incomparable formal rigor, visual beauty and haunting lyricism. A tireless perfectionist, Markopoulos crafted a unique mode of art cinema with an astonishingly minimum of funding and resources—often editing his negatives by hand with only razor blade and magnifying glass and perfecting in-camera editing techniques that brought a poetic density to his films. Evident throughout his first major films is a fascination with myth and ritual which would carry across Markopoulos’ later work and would, eventually, call him back to his ancestral Greece. The heady mythopoesis of key early films such as Swain and Twice a Man is also charged with a bold exploration of sexual and homosexual desire that was, in every way, far ahead of its time.

Although he was central to the rich exploration of the trance film by postwar American artists such as Maya Deren and Curtis Harrington, from the start of his career Markopoulos was driven by the ambition to define a mode of cinema uniquely in dialogue with the other arts—painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, poetry—an idea frequently explored in his prolific writings. After founding the ambitious New American Cinema movement—together with Shirley Clarke and Jonas Mekas—Markopoulos broke away from the factionalized American scene, departing in 1967 for Europe, together with his creative and life partner, filmmaker Robert Beavers, never to live again in the US. Disenchanted with the limited and contentious venues for experimental cinema, Markopolous withdrew his films from circulation, keeping them virtually unseen even as he continued to produce major new work. The last years of Markopoulos’ tragically foreshortened life were increasingly dedicated to his ambitious final work, Eniaios an epic reworking of his entire oeuvre into a sweeping and entirely silent eighty-hour cycle, designed to be screened in a specially consecrated plein-aire theater, named the Temenos, in rural Arcadia, Greece.

After Markopoulos’ death Robert Beavers began to realize the dream of Eniaios, founding the Temenos Association as a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and screening of Markopoulos’ epic cycle, and presenting screenings every four years at the Temenos site, beginning in 2004. The Temenos events have inspired a gradual rediscovery of Gregory Markopoulos’ cinema, with retrospectives and screenings of individual works taking place at select venues in the US and Europe. Later this fall, Mark Webber will publish the very first collection of Markopoulos writings which are certain to spark further interest and understanding of Markopoulos as an important thinker and theorist about the cinema. As a prelude to a major Markopoulos retrospective to be presented in conjunction with the book’s release in the fall of 2014, the Harvard Film Archive is pleased to present a showcase of Markopoulos’ early work, films all made before his departure for Europe and accompanied here by a selection of relevant and revelatory writings excerpted from the eagerly awaited volume, Film as Film: The Collected Writings of Gregory J. Markopoulos. For more information about Film as Film please visit www.thevisiblepress.com — Haden Guest