GENERALLY, GREGORY MARKOPOULOS’S love of elegant composition and his fascination with picturesque locations inspire the appreciation of his films. His gorgeous shots once allowed contemplation; shot change and the internal dynamics of montage created rhythm. But toward the end of his life, he recut all his films and edited them along with new material into the approximately eighty-hour Eniaios (1947–91), where a matrix of black leader, sometimes intercut with clear white flashes and longer white expanses, encloses static shots, often less than one second and never longer than five. Sometimes these shots are so short as to be nearly unidentifiable. In Eniaios the rhythm is imposed by the matrix.
Markopoulos destroyed the originals of all the films he fragmented, though most of them survive in the archives that collected them before he decided to make his colossal summa. He directed that Eniaios be shown only in the Temenos, an open-air cinema in a field in Lyssarea, Greece, the Peloponnesian village from which his father emigrated to Toledo, Ohio. He died in 1992 before he could see any of this work projected. So his heir, the filmmaker Robert Beavers, has meticulously supervised the repair of tens of thousands of splices and arranged for projections at the Temenos since 2004. At first, Beavers was able to raise sufficient funds to make the repairs, printing, and screening arrangements every four years, with three of the film’s twenty-two “orders” shown at each session. Now an anonymous benefactor has made it possible to hold the event at intervals of two years. The sixth and penultimate manifestation took place on June 27 through June 30, 2024. I have attended them all from the beginning, fully expecting to die without having seen the end of Eniaios. Were it not for the benefactor, I would have been over ninety when the film cycle ended. At eighty, I have a reasonable hope of seeing completed the most profound cinematic experience of my lifetime.
Each of the twenty-two orders contains between five and thirteen reels, mixing portraits, places, and mythic narratives. Elements from Markopoulos’s mythographic compendium, The Illiac Passion (1967),appear in every order. Eros, o Basileus (1967),his study of theteenage Beavers, occurs in many of them. Overall, camera movement is rare. In fact, there is very little movement at all. Most of the portraits are posed. Archaeological ruins predominate, although we do see the homes of Wagner, W. H. Auden, and other artists, and shots of Graubünden, Switzerland, where the filmmaker lived in the early 1970s with Beavers.
This summer we saw four orders over four nights. Maintaining a sense of the entire work is difficult, even with the shortened two-year break. Still, I sensed a bold shift of rhythm in order XV. It begins with a sedate portrait of composer Ben Weber. At two points he gesticulates wildly. That seems to be a pattern across the four-night session: calm representations that break into brief eruptions of action.
The slow portrait of Weber is followed by a similarly paced one of playwright Eugène Ionesco, often looking upward in a visionary mode. But before the order moves on to the comparably posed portrait of painter Mark Tobey, an evocation of the monastery in Sankt Florian, Austria, associated with composer Anton Bruckner, gives us a long, nearly abstract poem of black-and-white leader, at times a minute long before the appearance of a split-second image. Beavers pointed out the curious affinity between Markopoulos and Bruckner: Neither lived to see his long, complex works performed or exhibited publicly.
The passages of The Illiac Passion seen in the orders of Eniaios that screened this past summer derived from that film’s Apollo and Hyacinthus story, with naked men kissing and Manneristically posing, as if etched by light in black spaces. Beavers, too, is nude throughout Eros, o Basileus. Their appearance conforms to the predominance of naked males in Greek sculpture and even points to the superiority of cinema in representing flesh.
In shots of the ancient Greek city Epidaurus, Marko-poulos ignores the famous theater, showing instead the ruined gray stones of the tholos. This is the medicinal Aesculapian cult center par excellence. The Temenos itself was conceived by its maker as a neo-Aesculapian cure for media poisoning.
In order XVI, the pace picks up until the leisurely rhythm is restored, gradually pushing toward stasis, only for the order to end with a narrative “mystery”: the miracle of moving pictures, reborn. Just as a place, Sankt Florian, stood metonymically for Bruckner, a portrait, of the critic Timos Malanos, stands in for the poet that critic knew and championed: Constantine Cavafy. Although Markopoulos realized that, ontologically, a frame of black or white is the same as any image, he toys with our desire to see “bodies and things.” Incorporating longer passages of “punctuation” than earlier, the sequences composing this order regularly threatened to end, only to be revived. Shots of the classical theater of Ithomi, then, remind the viewer of the ancient tradition Eniaios invokes, much as Epidaurus hinted at the association of Markopoulos’s project with Aesculapius.
At eighty, I have a reasonable hope of seeing completed the most profound cinematic experience of my lifetime.
The magnificent portrait of Oskar Kokoschka in his studio reestablishes the image as a field of action. Even when the center of attention is a nearly still image of his hand holding a cigarette, the smoke rising from the cigarette nevertheless dynamizes the frame. There are merely two to fifteen seconds between clusters of brief shots of the painter moving about before drawing easels, with some of the shots upside-down (as often occurs in other portraits). Several times, passages of white leader lasting two to twenty seconds turn to black just before there is a quick series of shots of Kokoschka on the seemingly vibrating screen.
The shots from The Mysteries (1968), like those from Himself as Herself (1967), that conclude order XVI, are among the longest in the whole film: They last up to approximately four seconds each. In his 2021 book The Melancholy Lens: Loss and Mourning in the American Avant-Garde Cinema, Tony Pipolo found The Mysteries the least mythopoetic and most mournful of Markopoulos’s works. He wrote:
[T]he image of the protagonist’s embrace of a skeleton . . . pointedly conflates . . . the erotic with the maudlin, desire with the macabre. . . . The merger is explicit: his nude body, seen from the back, does not just share the frame with the skeleton; he lies intertwined with it, gathering its spiny limbs with his own fleshy ones to position them on his naked back, as if to enforce impossibly interactive embraces . . .
Action returns in order XVII. The brief portrait of Ernst Fuchs, the Austrian monarchist painter of fantastic realism, is bluish in tonality, contrasting with the reds and browns of the following portrait of Dadaist Hans Richter. Some of the portraits that the filmmaker rearranged were originally shots with superimpositions, making it nearly impossible to isolate a static image for his minimalist reconstruction. Richter is shown at work, designing graphics and handling 16-mm rewinds, the numerous superimpositions foreclosing the option of stasis. However, in the next portrait, ofBenno Premsela, action is reduced to the mere turning of the pages of a book as the Dutch designer poses on a sofa.
The “place” of this order is Auden’s house in Kirch-stetten, Austria, represented mainly by exterior views, including some of the surrounding woods. Then, after a return to the Mannerist nudes of The Illiac Passion,we see in longer shots the protagonist of Eros, o Basileus crouching amid stored paintings and miming the gestures of archery, before the many long-held moments from Himself as Herself end the order, suggesting the agony of an affluent young man in an ornately decadent town house.
In order XVIII, all four portraits show gay men: first artist Paul Thek and Auden, later choreographer Frederick Ashton and dancer Rudolf Nureyev. Between those two sets, the filmmaker placed the Theater of Dionysus, preferring to concentrate on the fourth-century CE Bema of Phaidros (showing the cult/life of Dionysus in sculptural relief) rather than on the theater seats, already familiar from the Ithomi episode. The reliefs point to the continuity between Hellenic imagery and his own cinema.
Sculptural reliefs of feet, the only surviving remnants of larger statues (seen very quickly after long black-and-white pauses), introduce the idea of dance, refracted by subsequent images of Ashton’s and Nureyev’s shoes. Markopoulos’s long passages of black leader again and again promise the ends of episodes in this order. At the final site, Olympia (where an earthquake wrecked the temple of Zeus, father of Eniaios’s heroes, Dionysus and Herakles), Markopoulos emphasizes the empty place where the monuments to victors were displayed, as if to suggest that Thek, Auden, Ashton, and Nureyev were the champions of sculpture, poetry, choreography, and dance, respectively, surpassing all their contemporaries.
For Markopoulos, cinema was the supreme art, the culmination of a tradition of representation that began in ancient Greece. Andrei Tarkovsky said that the function of art is to prepare us to die. For Markopoulos, it is to help us to live again, to be reborn in the power of Aesculapius.
P. Adams Sitney is the author, most recently, of Marvelous Names in Literature and Cinema (Crescent Moon Publishing, 2023).
