Thursday, November 3, 2011
Film Markopoulos Unbound
Posted by J.R. Jones on 11.03.11 at 03:31 PM
- Courtesy the Temenos Archive and the Austrian Film Museum, Vienna.
Markopoulos made some 28 films between 1947 and '67, and in the late 70s he set out to reedit what he felt were his 16 most important works into the "Eniaios" cycle, which would run about 80 hours. Favoring the ones he'd shot in color over those in black-and-white, he dropped the films' original soundtracks and added footage from 65 more films that he'd made in Europe, many of them studies of sacred sites. Sitney called Eniaios II "as astonishing a revelation of cinematic power as anything I had seen over the course of my nearly five decades in active pursuit of extraordinary films."
Amy Beste of "Conversations at the Edge" reports that Eniaios II, which was unavailable for preview as we went to press on Tuesday, will be screened from "a gorgeous 16-millimeter archival print." The program will include a discussion with SAIC professsor Bruce Jenkins and, via Skype, Sitney, a professor of visual arts at Princeton University and author of Visionary Film, the standard history on postwar avant-garde filmmaking in America. On Friday, November 18, at 7 PM, University of Chicago Film Studies Center will present a program of Markopoulos's last U.S. works, including Ming Green (1966), Bliss (1967), Through a Lens Brightly: Mark Turbyfill (1967), and Genius (1970).
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