Light Movement 18: Gregory Markopoulos
Doors: 19:30 / Start time: 20:00
Entrance 6-10 euro (up to your offer)
For this months screening we are extremely lucky to have access to two prints of films by Gregory J. Markopoulos - the longer duration of Twice a Man, in which the filmmaker pushes his vision of an entirely new narrative cinematic form, followed by Bliss, a six minute film portraying with typical Markopoulos restrictiveness, an interior of an 18th century Byzantine Church on Hydra in Greece.
Screening night curated by James Edmonds as part of the Light Movement series
Part of the transmediale/CTM Vorspiel 2017 festival
Twice a Man
US 1963, 16mm, color, 49 min.
Based on Markopoulos’s modernist reworking of the myth of Hippolytus, in which a chaste youth rejects the incestuous advances of his mother, Phaedre, and is saved from death by a caring physician, Twice a Man was filmed by Markopoulos in and around New York. For Markopoulos, this short feature represented his most elaborate attempt to date to create "a new narrative form through the fusion of the classic montage technique with a more abstract system." The film opens with an extended passage of black leader and the sound of falling rain before plunging into a dazzlingly complex array of interwoven single frames and clusters of images to elaborate a tale of artistic rebirth.
Bliss
Greece 1967, 16mm, color, 6 min.
The first film made by Markopoulos after moving to Europe, Bliss was shot over the course of two days using only available light to create a lyrical study of the interior of the Church of St. John on the island of Hydra. * with extended thanks to Robert Beavers and The Temenos archives
More info: light-movement.blogspot.de // facebook.com/lightmovementseries