Gregory J. Markopoulos

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Gregory Markopoulos (* 12. March 1928 in Toledo , Ohio ; † 12. November 1992 in Freiburg ) was an American avant-garde - filmmakers .

Life

The child of Greek immigrants began filming with an 8 mm camera when he was twelve years old, and when he was 18 he shot his trilogy Du sang, de la volupte, et de la mort ( On the blood, on desire and on death , 1947–1948) . From 1940 he studied at the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television, among others with Joseph von Sternberg . Then based in New York City , he was considered a leading member of the New American Cinema movement around the independent film-makers' cooperative in the 1960s, not only as a filmmaker, but also - in his contributions to the magazine Film Culture - as a theorist.

Markopoulos was on the one hand a classicist , on the other hand an avant-garde . In his work he reflected on the old European roots of modern culture (the dialogues Charmides and Lysis by Plato , Prometheus Fettered by Aeschylus ) and tried to overcome them at the same time. He saw film as the medium for gaining a holistic perspective for the arts and intended to achieve the unity of music, painting and literature in it. In 1963 he wrote in his essay Towards a New Narrative Film Form “I am adopting a new narrative form by merging the classic assembly technique with a more abstract system by using short film phrases that evoke mental images.” This was implemented on James Joyce and his Approach reminiscent of stream of consciousness technology in the same year 1963 in Markopoulos' film Twice A Man , in which the plot of the mythological figures Hippolytus and Phaedra is interwoven with "musically-mathematically" organized image and sound structures.

For The Illiac Passion (1967) he won his artist colleagues Andy Warhol , Jack Smith and Taylor Mead as actors.

In 1967 he left the United States with his partner, the equally as experimental filmmaker working Robert Beavers , and they lived until his death in 1992 in Europe, particularly in Greece and Germany. The reason for this lay in his increasing bitterness over the commercialization of the independent film scene in America. He forbade the showing of his films, gave no more interviews and asked Father Adams Sitney to remove the chapter about him from the new edition of the standard work Visionary Film (1974).

Markopoulos dedicated his film (A) lter (A) ction (1968) to Rosa von Praunheim , who worked for him as an assistant director before his breakthrough.

In 1996 a retrospective was dedicated to Markopoulos in the Whitney Museum of American Art , in 2012 in the Pacific Film Archive , in 2014 in the Anthology Film Archives and in the Austrian Film Museum .

Films by Gregory Markopoulos

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  • 35, Boulevard General Koenig (1971)
  • Doldertal 7 (1971)
  • Hagiographia (1971)
  • Genius (1970)
  • Index Hans Richter (1969)
  • Sorrows (1969)
  • (A) lter (A) ction (1968)
  • Mysteries (1968)
  • The Illiac Passion (1967)
  • Bliss (1967)
  • Divine Damnation (1967)
  • Eros, O Basileus (1967)
  • Gammelion (1967)
  • Himself as Herself (1967)
  • Through a Lens Brightly: Mark Turbyfill (1967)
  • Galaxy (1966)
  • Ming Green (1966)
  • Death of Hemingway (1965)
  • Twice a Man (1964)
  • Award Presentation to Andy Warhol (1964)
  • Dionysus (1963)
  • Galini (1958)
  • Eldora (1953)
  • Arbres aux champignons (1951)
  • Swain (1950)
  • Flowers of Asphalt (1949)
  • The Dead Ones (1948)
  • Du sang, de la volupté et de la mort, part III: Charmides (1948)
  • Du sang, de la volupté et de la mort, part II: Lysis (1948)
  • You sang, de la volupté et de la mort, part I: Psyche (1948)

literature

  • Harry Tomicek, Austrian Film Museum , Vienna On the films by Gregory Markopoulos and Robert Beavers , 1983
  • Mark Weber (Ed.): Film as Film: The collected writings of Gregory J. Markopoulos , London: The Visible Press, 2014, ISBN 978-0-9928377-0-9

exhibition

  • Exhibition Gregory J. Markopoulos: Mythic Themes, Portraiture and Films of Place New York City, New York 1999

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Maja Naef: The Film of the Future , in: NZZ , April 11, 2015, p. 28
personal data
SURNAME Markopoulos, Gregory J.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American avant-garde filmmaker
DATE OF BIRTH March 12, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Toledo , Ohio, United States
DATE OF DEATH November 12, 1992
Place of death Freiburg im Breisgau , Baden-Wuerttemberg, Germany