Gregory Markopoulos born 12 March 1928 (d. 1992)Gregory Markopoulos was an American experimental filmmaker.
Born in Toledo, Ohio to Greek immigrant parents, Markopoulos began making 8mm films at an early age. He attended USC Film School in the late 1940s, and went on to become a notable member of the New American Cinema movement, a contributor to Film Culture magazine, and an instructor at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Markopoulos's contributions to film form begin with his earliest work of the 1940s, develop through the subsequent decades, and culminate in ENIAIOS, on which he worked during the final years of his life. His important innovations, such as editing with the smallest unit of film (the single frame), and the simultaneous narrative of past, present, and future, or his most individual use of colour, are all directed towards the representation and resolution of complex emotions. These innovations prefigure many contemporary practices in the arts. His influence is comparable with that of a Warhol as a filmmaker.
His best known film is perhaps The Illiac Passion (1964–67). The Illiac Passion is a radical interpretation of Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound that re-images the classical text within the realm of postwar American film and culture. Figures from New York's avant-garde community are cast as mythical beings, including Gerard Malanga (Ganymede), Jack Smith (Orpheus), Taylor Mead (The Demon or Sprite) and Andy Warhol (Poseidon) who rides an exercise bike over a sea of plastic sheeting. Markopolous’s most critically acclaimed film features hypnotic imagery and a sparse soundtrack that includes the director reading Thoreau's translation of the Aeschylus text and musical excerpts from Bartok.In 1967, he and his partner Robert Beavers left the United States for permanent residence in Europe. Once ensconced in self-imposed exile, Markopoulos withdrew his films from circulation, refused any interviews, and insisted that a chapter about him be removed from the 2nd edition of Visionary Film, P. Adams Sitney's seminal study of American Avant-Garde Cinema.
It could be that one of the reasons for his self-imposed exile was the negative response of American critics and curators to the homosexual content of his films.
While he continued to make films, his work went largely unseen for almost thirty years.
Markopoulos died in Germany in 1992 after a long illness. In 1994 Robert Beavers set up Tenemos, Inc, a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to the development of individual and noncommercial filmmaking through the restoration and exhibition of films by Markopoulos and Beavers.
Since the mid-1990s, the films of Gregory Markopoulos have received renewed public recognition through their exhibition by numerous institutions, including the New York Film Festival 1997; Rotterdam International Film Festival 1999; Istanbul Biennial 1999, Auditorium du Louvre 1998, 2000, and 2002; and the Whitney Museum of American Art 1996 (retrospective exhibition), 1999, and 2000. All events have been coordinated by Robert Beavers through the Temenos Archive.
The Temenos