Illustrations by Chantall Veerman.
Every few years, a projection screen is installed in a clearing near the Greek village of Lyssarea, in Arcadia. Hundreds of red beanbags and pillows dot the field, with benches at the rear and a 16mm film projector atop its wooden stand. As the sun sets over the craggy Peloponnese, the projector whirs to life and spectators settle in for open-air cinema. Crickets chirp. Dogs bark. The temperature falls. Moths prepare for an epic frenzy.
Without any opening credits, a flash of light floods the screen and then cuts to black. This is the Temenos. Long sections of black film leader advance and then strobe with clear leader, until sustained illumination bathes the audience. Dark again, the projection surface dissolves into the sky as our eyes readjust from the brightness. Finally, an image appears on the screen: the torqued body of a naked man glistening in warm light, his right arm stretched above his head. We cannot see his face or genitals, the pose both concealing and expressive, ancient and contemporary, mythic and real.
This is a frame from Gregory Markopoulos’s film The Illiac Passion (1967), adapted from the Aeschylus tragedy Prometheus Bound (ca. 450 BC). The play dramatizes Prometheus’s plight as he awaits divine punishment for revealing fire and the arts of civilization to humans. Inthe film, Aeschylus’s words (translated into English by Henry David Thoreau) and music by Béla Bartók commingle with the filmmaker’s messianic scenarios, starring Jack Smith as Orpheus, Andy Warhol as Poseidon, Gregory Battcock as Phaeton, Gerard Malanga as Ganymede, and Markopoulos himself as Narrator / The Filmmaker.
The Illiac Passion (Gregory Markopoulos, 1967).
Markopoulos (1928–1992) was a titan in the first generation of American avant-garde film. His first color film, Psyche (1947), was inspired by an unfinished lesbian novel by Pierre Louÿs and transfigured color, sound, and narrative. In the 1960s, with Twice A Man (1963)—a scripted feature based on the myth of Hippolytus—and Gammelion (1968)—five minutes of footage at the Castello Rocca Sinibalda edited into a mostly imageless hour-long film—Markopoulos honed his technique of isolating discrete “film phrases”1 and repeating the units as if they were harmonies within a musical composition. Early plans for the Prometheus film were to mask and optically print superimposed 8mm and 16mm frames within larger 35mm images, with the smallest referring to the innermost level of consciousness.2 The enduring power of Markopoulos’s granular, reverential cinema came from evoking “thought-images” from the film phrases and “gradually convinc[ing] the spectator not only to see and hear, but to participate in what is being created on the screen, on both the narrative and introspective levels.”3
In the field, at the Temenos, we glimpse The Illiac Passion for the fraction of a second it takes to discern an arm and a twisting body. As quickly as it appears, the single frame, suspended in eternity, flashes to black. The after-image rests on the screen until both disappear in the twilight. This is not the theatrical cut of the film nor is it the expanded edition. This is Eniaios (1947–91, Greek for “unity” and “uniqueness”), Markopoulos’s magnum opus in which he radically reworks his own film material, having withdrawn the original cuts from distribution. By extracting shards of his filmography—in many cases replacing the majority of the runtime with clear and black leader—Markopoulos asserted a clarified, uncompromising encounter with cinema. The 80-hour duration derives from the total runtime of his films. Superseding all of them, Eniaios is organized into 22 film orders, each featuring portraits of individuals and places as well as selections from Markopoulos’s films. The only title whose frames are dispersed throughout all of the film orders is The Illiac Passion, which seeds a mythic continuity within the silent film. The material and harmonic ambitions of Eniaios are so immense that it has taken decades after Markopoulos’s death and millions of dollars to complete the internegatives and prints to view the work, which the filmmaker never saw projected.
Photograph by Ross Meckfessel.
Markopoulos first imagined a Temenos (Greek for “temple ground” or “healing ground”) in the early 1970s as “an ideal archive and a presentation area for [his] own work”4 and a “sanctuary where one may approach understanding.” After a 1980 screening of The Illiac Passion in Athens was scuttled because of concern over nudity and homoerotic content, Markopoulos turned to his father’s ancestral village of Lyssarea to present his films on a “virile screen.”5 Each September from 1980 to 1986, Markopoulos and his partner, the filmmaker Robert Beavers, visited Lyssarea to screen each other’s work and publish new materials written on the occasion. The Temenos archive—their camera originals, prints, and papers—has been held in Switzerland since 1968, and since 2004, the Temenos site in Greece has been dedicated to screening Eniaios.
For Temenos 2024, held over five days in late June, approximately 150 of us convened for the premiere of Eniaios XV–XVIII. We were picked up by coach buses at the Karaiskaki Square in Athens and drove west into the mountains. Hours later, my bus arrived at Loutra Iraia, where we were greeted by the kind folks at the hotel and guesthouses that sheltered and nourished us throughout our stay. The first night, Beavers and the other Temenos organizers hosted a hearty welcome dinner: feta, souvlaki, spicy garlic spread, potatoes, wine, and stuffed vegetables. There were no screenings. Instead, we had a chance to rest and get to know each other in our respective villages. On every bed was a large-format program printed with blue ink on creamy paper. It includes the opening of Markopoulos’s 1974 essay, “Towards A Complete Order”:
There is a cascade here, and above it another, and above that one many other waterfalls. These encourage. Distance encourages the ascent towards the Future.
The essay extolls that “the Voice is the Spectator as Receiver” and then concludes with this passage:
In Distant Years the Future Elected One of the Temenos will repeat, “It is like being in a rainbow!” For it is for him who deserves it that it has been built. It will be his hand which has elevated and protected the thousands of feet of film originals. Indeed, it will be his voice.6
Photograph by Burak Çevik.
Loutra, where about 50 of us stayed this year, has more robust lodging than other villages nearby because of a hydrotherapy center fed by thermal springs that were known in ancient times. While I floated in the yellowish water, I hummed and sang to myself, readying for the Temenos by soaking in the minerals and listening to my voice resonate in the semicircular building.
In the mornings and afternoons, we avoided the extreme heat by reading, eating, and talking with new friends in the shade. Before the first night of screenings, I met the curator Matthew Lyons, who has been to all six Temenos presentations of Eniaios. When he spoke about the somatic adjustment of acclimatizing to the rhythms of the strobing and intermittent images, I imagined that Eniaios might not fully sink in at first and that I would understand more with each film order. Indeed, I was reconfigured as a spectator within the course of each night. I felt hypnotized and pulled under at the beginning of each screening—a few times I could not help but close my eyes—whereas I was always most alert by the end of the last reel.
Flickering between conscious and subconscious registers, Markopoulos believed that a “filmmaker-physician” could “translate the creative film spectator…to a loftier existence outside the visible, mundane world.”7 He often cited Aesclipius, the Greco-Roman god of medicine, whose healing sanctuary at Epidaurus contained sleeping halls where the sick received prescriptions in their dreams. Before the second night of this year’s Temenos, Beavers encouraged the crowd to doze off during Eniaios but requested a neighborly nudge if anyone snored loudly. That night, we saw a reel with footage from the ruins of Epidaurus.
As if lining up at the closest safe distance to a bonfire, some folks posted up at the foot of the projection screen each evening. I tried lying on a beanbag in the fourth row, but I did not like being so close that the projector light muffled the stars. During the reel change, I moved to the back, where I sat on a bench next to the poet Joel Newberger. Prior visits to Temenos solidified Newberger’s preference for this perpendicular viewing angle and increased distance, where he could “receive the touch of the frames directly” rather than obliquely, from the ground. I continued reorienting myself to the screen, standing behind the projector for part of the final night.
Photograph by Ross Meckfessel.
Markopoulos initially conceived of Temenos as an all-male affair with an open-air structure, referring in his writings to Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s vision of a theater for only men. Beavers rightly did away with sex or gender limitations at Temenos, and there are no current plans to hire an architect. Winding from the Lyssarea village square to the screening grounds one evening, I overheard that Markopoulos had in fact imagined Temenos as a gathering site for gay men, and I asked Beavers about this distinction. He replied that “in Gregory’s eyes, [male and gay male] would have blurred.” After more discussion about sexuality and the collective experience of being in the work at Temenos, Beavers offered that Eniaios is “a love mysticism,” and that each film order moves between the poles of asceticism and sensuality.
On the first night of screenings, only the more ascetic half of Eniaios XV was projected. We saw fleeting portraits of the composer Ben Weber and the playwright Eugène Ionesco with little movement, separated by lengths of black and clear leader. Unfortunately, the second half of the order had been loaded onto one very large reel, which in the humidity had become too heavy to be taken up correctly by the projector, even in the skilled hands of projectionist Kate MacKay.
The next evening, we picked up where we had left off. The film scholar and artist Fred Camper was present, and remembered his reaction to seeing Markopoulos films more than 50 years ago: “My God, someone is organizing light and color with the integrity of classical music!” Recut into Eniaios, images from The Illiac Passion still communicate a visionary and operatic quest, reckoning with the communication of powerful secrets (fire, homosexuality). The second half of Eniaios XV shifted from staid, sometimes bluish tinted images (uncorrected Tungsten stock shot in daylight) into movement, warmth, and flesh. Eniaios XVI similarly concludes with scenes from The Illiac Passion as well as homoerotic footage from The Mysteries (1968), including a memorable sequence of a naked man on the floor making love to a skeleton.
Photograph by Burak Çevik.
Straight, formalist considerations of Markopoulos have had the tendency to avoid or misunderstand the sexual subject matter and substance in the work. In 1955, Jonas Mekas derisively cited Markopoulos in a Film Culture article about the “conspiracy of homosexuality that is becoming one of the most persistent and most shocking characteristics” of American experimental film. Mekas went on to assert that this “art of abnormality is unmotivated, unresolved, and [lacking] a moral dimension.” While homophobic attacks were fashionable then (as with Henry Hart’s 1951 denigration of the early Markopoulos Du sang, de la volupté et de la mort trilogy [1948] as a “degenerate film”), it is now common for film theoreticians and enthusiasts to completely pass over reference to sexuality. Eniaios makes such prudishness difficult by uniting the ascetic and sensuous in a porous organism that can be entered from many positions.
Before the final night of screenings, each Temenos concludes with a town hall in which Beavers takes questions and observations from the spectators, a wonderful opportunity to hear the ideas that have germinated. When someone asked what Markopoulos sought to accentuate with the stretches of clear and black leader, Beavers acknowledged that he didn’t feel capable of giving an answer. He then added that Markopoulos “knew what he was doing…but there is a speculative element, also.” Beavers contrasted Markopoulos with Igor Stravinsky, who needed to play his music on a piano as he composed: Markopoulos did not need to see the work to understand its totality. Later, Camper offered an interpretation of the sections of light and darkness. On the one hand, memory allows the images that you’ve seen before to flow into the “blank” sections and fill them. On the other hand, the sections stand for much more. “You start to feel the whole cosmos.”
Christos Paraschos, a physician I met in Athens a few days later, recalled that the conversation at the 2022 Temenos focused on the technical elements of Eniaios while excluding sex and psychodrama. Most stories about parent-child sexual dynamics focus on the Oedipus myth, yet Markopoulos chose Hippolytus and his lustful mother, Phaedra, as the source material for Twice A Man. After pointing this out, Paraschos asked about Markopoulos’s relationship with his mother, which ended the conversation, as if it were intrusive to follow the allusive cascades of the work into personal waters. Markopoulos was very close with his mother, and they exchanged letters throughout his life, always written in her native Greek. Her death from cancer in early 1966 was a turning point in Markopoulos’s career. It was while mourning her that he made the elegiac Ming Green (1966), his first portrait film, which was edited entirely within the camera by exposing and re-exposing select frames of the film.
Photograph by Burak Çevik.
Film phrases from The Mysteries in Eniaios XVI alternate melodically between depicting individuals and pairs. After the culminating skeletal tangle cut to black, I turned my gaze upward so that the afterimage could live in the stars. The next flash of pure light obliterated whatever residue was left. Markopoulos edited Eniaios during the worst years of the AIDS pandemic, which devastated the community of artists and friends he and Beavers had left in New York City when they relocated to Europe in 1967. There was an abiding atmosphere of queer fatalism throughout the 2024 cycles of Eniaios. In the final film order screened at this year’s Temenos, Eniaios XVIII, all of the portrait subjects were gay men, two of whom died from AIDS-related complications. First was the artist Paul Thek, seen in his studio alongside glazed insects and his Technological Reliquaries, the “meat series” that encased mixed-media sculptures in hard containers—one of a disembodied leg in an ancient Greek greave. In Markopoulos’s camera, the film frames themselves become reliquaries to preserve Thek’s light.
A short length of black / white / black separates Thek from the poet W. H. Auden, appearing distinguished and contemplative. Markopoulos shot these film portraits in New York City for the film that would become Galaxie (1966), and he asked the sitters (including Amy Taubin, Storm de Hirsch, Jasper Johns, and Maurice Sendak) to choose a personal object that might be included. Auden chose a barometer. The writer Samuel R. Delany characterized Auden’s Arcadia as “that wonderful place where everyone eats natural foods and no machine larger than one person can fix in an hour is allowed in,”8 contrasted with Auden’s Land of the Flies, where fire, famine, and disease shatter the quality of life. Delany believes that Auden’s Arcadia and Land of the Flies are the same place as seen from different angles, their apparent differences attributable to the temperament of the observers. Temenos was an awesome demonstration of the subjective variation and co-creation in works of art, in which moving one’s seat or even slight movements of the head or eye could unveil new perceptive possibilities. I tried to entrain my blinking with the rhythm of the editing so that I didn’t miss anything.
From Auden, Markopoulos cuts to the ancient Theater of Dionysus, on the south side of the Acropolis. Fragments of feet and headless torsos reinscribe the sense of decay, stillness, and rebirth: eros, archaeology, remainders. As Eniaios XVIII shifts toward its concluding passages, we see the ballet dancer and choreographer Rudolf Nurejev in a leather jacket near a body of water with swaying grasses, and then in more elaborate superimpositions. Ken Jacobs coined “eternalism” as the stroboscopic effect of producing the illusion of depth with only one eye. Markopoulos wrought a related inversion of narrative progression that envisioned a queer eternity.
Photograph by Burak Çevik.
After this year’s Temenos concluded and another bus dropped us back in Athens, the Cypriot artist Marina Xenofontos hosted me at her studio for the afternoon, where we continued talking about the rigorous conditions of Markopoulos’s work and its unparalleled poetry, duration, and spirituality. We reappraised other visionary film and land art installations in the gravitational field of Temenos, a total work more ambitious and rarefied than anything we had seen.
Beyond the sublime screening conditions—shooting stars, warm fragrant breezes, and friendly village dogs who followed us to the site and cuddled during screenings—the films themselves, as films, were exquisite. Before coming to Temenos, I imagined the sections of black and clear leader as redacted speech. I had seen only a few intact Markopoulos films, and therefore did not know much of the source material for this gargantuan remix. I worried that I would not be able to decode Eniaios. But, rather than occlude or make absent, these passages are the connective tissue of Eniaios. With their relentless polyrhythms, they are as present and full as the photographic images. Through my glasses, I could see the entire color spectrum in the projection light hitting the screen, and early on I imagined forms and textures as my eyes played tricks on me. It is not only that the abstract stretches generate anticipation: When will the next shot appear? They are the pores that Eniaios breathes through to sustain the filmmaker’s flame.
Markopoulos insisted on a new narrative form that placed film spectators “inside the rainbow” and exposed “a whole new scale of values”9 therein. Of course, atmospheric phenomena such as rainbows and mirages cannot ever be truly entered or walked around. Like utopias, they are always over there, ahead, behind. As Eniaios slowly comes into form, it becomes clear that the film is woven from ancient gestures and contemporary ruin.
The film spectators who assemble to dream and behold together at Temenos want to know how the film ends. Some remember an abundance of shots of rocks in the first film orders, which also raises the question of what shots are not being remembered. Even before the premiere of Eniaios concludes, memory’s process of fragmentation and dislocation has already begun.
With Eniaios, Markopoulos destroyed the integrity of what had been considered complete films, his life’s work, in order to combine them, insert space, and enforce the viewing conditions necessary for the orphic offering to be preserved and received. Markopoulos built a towering filmography teeming with passion. When he looked back—at the beauty and the devastation—he composed a healing media ritual for the distant future.
- Gregory Markopoulos “Towards a New Narrative Film Form” (1963) in Film as Film: The Collected Writings of Gregory J. Markopoulos, ed. Mark Webber (London: The Visible Press, 2014), 207. ↩
- Matthew Yokobosky, “Image, Beauty, Association: Biographical Notes on the Life and Work of Gregory Markopoulos,” in Gregory J. Markopoulos: Mythic Themes, Portraiture, and Films of Place (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1996), 37. ↩
- Yokobosky, “Image, Beauty, Association,” 208. ↩
- Gregory Markopoulos, “A Solemn Pause…” (1971) in Film as Film, 349. ↩
- Gregory Markopoulos, “The Redeeming of the Contrary” (1971) in Film as Film, 275. ↩
- Gregory Markopoulos, “Towards a Complete Order” (1974) in Film as Film. ↩
- Gregory Markopoulos, “The Filmmaker As Physician of the Future” (1967) in Film As Film, 231. ↩
- Samuel R. Delany, Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts & the Politics of the Paraliterary (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1999), 324. ↩
Markopoulos, “Towards A New Narrative Film Form,” 208. ↩