Film as Film, Archive as Creation is a project by François Bovier, relying on the concept of Exhibited Cinema, with the participation of Robert Beavers. In 2015, Bovier had already organized an exhibition in collaboration with CIRCUIT, entitled Impact Art Vidéo74. The exhibition Film as Film, Archive as Creation at CIRCUIT features twelve screenings of Gregory J. Markopoulos’ “Twice a Man Twice”, the script of “Twice a Man”, its frame-by-frame transcription by Tom S. Chomont, and an archive from The Temenos.
Under the banner of “film as film”, the absolute cinema of Greek-born American filmmaker Gregory J. Markopoulos (1928-1992) stages still shots interrupted by the sudden irruption of autonomous photograms. His films focus partly on portraits of people or the investigation of places, and partly on adaptations of literary texts or Hellenic myths. Since the 1940s, his films have contributed to the renewal of visionary cinema. A spokesman for the New American Cinema Group and a pioneer of experimental film and poetry cinema, he nevertheless broke with the independent filmmakers’ cooperative movement in 1967, when he and filmmaker Robert Beavers left for Europe. With complete autonomy, he reoriented his work around a utopian project, The Temenos, conceived as an archive, a place of work and cinematographic creation. His last epic work, Eniaios (1948-1990, circa 80 hours), which re-edits his earlier films and integrates new sequences in a new order, is screened every four years in the open air at Temenos, a site in Arcadia, Greece, next to his father’s native village.
Twice a Man (1963, 45 minutes) marks a turning point in Markopoulos’ cinematographic work, introducing a new mode of editing which alternates between still shots and bursts of autonomous photograms (varying in scale from one to a dozen). Shot on a Bolex H16 Reflex, Twice a Man is an adaptation of the Hippolytus legend, transposed to 1960s New York. The film is driven by three main points of identification: the character of Hippolytus (Paul Kilb), resurrected by Asclepius; his lover, the artist-physician (Albert Torgesen); and Phaedra, portrayed as a young woman (Olympia Dukakis) or an elderly mother (Violet Roditi). Twice a Man Twice is a performative variation on this film, set in the context of expanded cinema. In 1966, Markopoulos projected two copies of Twice a Man side by side, one running forwards,
the other backwards. Sound is maintained only on the projector which shows the film right-side up. At the film’s mid-point, both copies present the same image, though one is inverted. At CIRCUIT, we reiterate this filmic performance, in which projection is invested as an act of creation.
Support
Ville de Lausanne, État de Vaud , Loterie Romande , Profiducia Conseils SA, Fondation Casino Barrière Montreux
A research project of ECAL/Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne with the support of Hes·so
Acknowledgments
Robert Beavers (Temenos Archive), Paul Bernard (KBCB), Max Ciuffi, Robert Dutoit, Davide Fornari (ECAL), Alexis Georgacopoulos (ECAL), Erwin van‘t Hart, Balthazar Lovay, Matthew Lyons, Selma Meuli (KBCB), Achilleas Papakonstantis, Els van Riel, Tomas Sciortino, Loïc Valceschini, Jamal Venuti.
