Et in Arcadia Ego

The international audience included film connoisseurs, together with others more interested in Greek culture, literature and Classical art, and curious locals from the surrounding villages.

Markopoulos conceived Eniaios in the 1980s as a summation of his entire filmmaking knowledge, created specifically to be viewed at this location. The screenings, organized by filmmaker Robert Beavers (Markopoulos’ companion from the late 1960s until the latter’s death in 1992), were the result of several years’ fundraising and planning, aimed ultimately at establishing the Temenos, a film theatre, archive and library dedicated to the works of the two filmmakers, a cinematic parallel to ambitious sculptural projects such as Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field (1977) or Spiral Jetty (1970) by Robert Smithson. The site of the Temenos – which may be translated from the Greek as ‘sacred grove’, or more appropriately ‘a piece of land set apart’ – was chosen near the village of Lyssaraia, where Markopoulos’ father was born. This, according to Beavers, offered an ideal ‘viewing space in harmony with the image’.

Throughout his extraordinary life Markopoulos remained committed to ‘film as film’, and referred to filmmaking as ‘a supreme art in a dark age’. His approach was centred on the fundamental factor of the single frame as the smallest unit of a film, and the belief that a film is only a succession of distinct frames and therefore does not contain movement. Sound was often treated separately from image in his early works, and was ultimately rejected in Eniaios, which is totally silent.

Markopoulos was one of the first artists to regard the filmmaker as the individual creator of every aspect of a complete work, from production to presentation. He began making films as a student at the University of Southern California. His first work, the trilogy Du sang de la volupté et de la mort (Of the Blood of Voluptuousness and of Death, 1947), addressed homosexuality in a time before such subjects were acceptable, and following a screening at New York University in 1951 created a scandal because of its ‘suggestions that abnormal perceptions and moods are desirable’. As avant-garde cinema gained momentum throughout the 1960s, Markopoulos was recognized as one of its leading figures. Films such as Twice a Man (1963), Galaxie (1966) and 1967’s The Illiac Passion (which he felt was most representative of his life’s work) cemented his reputation as an artist whose vision was matched by his technical mastery. His practice pursued three interrelated directions (interpretations of literature or mythological sources, portraits of individuals and studies of locations or architecture) and used a variety of cinematic techniques (intuitive editing that privileged the use of the single frame and interwove simultaneous narratives in montaged film phrases, in-camera superimpositions and temporal composition improvised during the filming, together with his exacting use of sound and silence).

In 1967 Markopoulos and Beavers left the USA for Europe, and over the next few years Markopoulos withdrew all of his work from distribution and exhibition. They spent the next decades travelling and making films – based mainly in Italy, Switzerland and Greece – but screenings were rare, with the two filmmakers often rejecting invitations to show their work. For almost 25 years they relied instead on the generous patronage of individuals and occasional sales of film prints. Markopoulos famously refused to allow those who had contributed to his works ever to see them, firmly believing that the artist should be implicitly trusted to follow his own creative vision. The idea of the Temenos was first mooted by Markopoulos in 1970, and ten years later the two filmmakers chose the site. Between 1980 and 1986 annual screenings of selected early films were held there as a symbolic effort towards realizing their ultimate goal.

For the event in June 2004 most of the visitors were housed in the small spa town of Loutra Iraias. At sunset each day a minibus and cars transported the audience to the projection site 20 kilometres away, in an area of outstanding natural beauty. Local people had helped prepare the viewing area, building the wooden screen and transporting benches down from the village. As the bright moon and canopy of stars illuminated the clearing, there was a very real buzz of anticipation.

Of the 15 hours of Eniaios that have so far been printed, approximately ten hours were projected over three nights. Eniaios, which means ‘unity’, is a single, monumental film that interweaves material from Markopoulos’ entire oeuvre, spanning five decades of production. It comprises re-edited versions of his best-known films of the 1950s and 1960s, together with many unseen films made in the 1970s and 1980s. In total the work encompasses 100 individual titles, structured into 22 cycles (or ‘film orders’) of between three and five hours each.

Eniaios should be regarded as a single unit, however, to be viewed over several weeks, and is an accumulation of increasing sequences of frames, phrases, reels and cycles. Markopoulos chose to include only those images that were most significant to him, and these brief images (such as architectural details, bodies, expressions or gestures) – many of which appear only a single frame (1/24th of a second) at a time – are all separated by measures of either black or clear film, which in turn produce complete darkness or intense white light. (The longest continuous photographic image I remember seeing over these ten hours of Eniaios was about 15 seconds, with the few other ‘long shots’ only around five seconds at the most.) With this technique an image held on the screen for half a second or more becomes an intensely bold and colourful presence, and perspectival depth and motion become exaggerated; an image of a man walking towards the camera is endowed with the momentum of the Lumières’ first train approaching the unsuspecting cinema audience.

Of the Markopoulos films that have been more widely seen, it is Gammelion (1968) that comes closest to the structure of Eniaios. Ostensibly a portrait of an Italian castle, it is a 55-minute film made with only six minutes of photographed footage. Each shot is separated by hundreds of fades from and to black or white. These cuts and transitions from ‘empty screen’ to ‘image’ are not systematically calculated, but are felt and arranged in constantly developing rhythms, building gradual crescendos and diminuendos as in a piece of music.

In the editing of his later films Markopoulos allowed the spectator an incredible amount of freedom, and the unhurried pace of Eniaios allows for long, gradually developing passages that can carry the viewer to a high perceptual level. It is not necessary to hold onto, or question, every individual image: the film experience as a whole is articulated through the accumulation of the larger phrases and the emotions they create in the individual viewer. The spectator, occasionally drifting between sleep and consciousness, is frequently lifted into the ‘intuition space’ created by the filmmaker.

It’s impossible to concentrate on the screen for 80 hours, or even one evening’s projection, and Markopoulos did not expect this. The act of viewing was informal; it was possible to get up and walk around, or to step back and watch the screen from a distance, appreciating its location within the natural environment. The frequent use of clear film throws an intense white light on the screen, which is in turn reflected back, illuminating the entire site and making the audience aware of their surroundings.

The concept of the Temenos is often misinterpreted as an arrogant or separatist ideal; in fact, it is about respecting the work and its demands, presenting it correctly and giving the audience an absolutely unique and elevated experience. Though the idea developed out of Markopoulos’ frustration with what he found to be the inadequate presentation and general disregard of film as an art, it sought to provide the spectator with the opportunity to see and understand the work as it was intended. As details of the sequences of images from the films begin to fade from memory, what remains is the sense of being there. The act of being at the Temenos, within the surrounding landscape and culture, is as much a part of the experience as the contents of the monumental reels of film.
With thanks to Robert Beavers.