Gregory Markopoulos, one of the most singular filmmakers of 1960s American underground cinema and a central figure in both the New American Cinema and the Filmmakers’ Cooperative, left the United States for Europe in 1967. By the time he was conceiving Gammelion, several unrealized production plans, declining health, and financial hardship had already converged upon him. He had once intended to film Julien Gracq’s novel The Castle of Argol at the Castello di Rocca Sinibalda in Italy, but the project never came to fruition.
Markopoulos, however, did not abandon the place. His plan to travel to Rocca Sinibalda was first canceled after he nearly died from a ruptured appendix, and even after he arrived in Italy, he was unable to obtain the thirty-five rolls of film he had originally intended to use. What he actually had in hand were only two rolls of 16mm film. Even so, he was confident, and wrote: “And these two rolls of film must be as precious to me as the wax of light flickering on the hard desk of the poorest of writers. Truly then, I am seeking a manner of telling what it is I must say by using a purer form of image than I have in the past. Particularly grateful am I to those who say my work is static. For now, they will see what will seem to them even more static!”
A little earlier, in the mid-1960s, Edward Owens, an African American filmmaker from the South Side of Chicago, was studying painting and sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Owens, who had already been making 8mm films for several years, met Markopoulos when he arrived to establish the school’s film program, and at Markopoulos’s urging, he moved to New York in 1966. In New York, Owens came into contact with figures such as Andy Warhol, Marie Menken, and Charles Boultenhouse. Still only a teenager, he made four films in the span of just a few years.
Owens’s films clearly reveal Markopoulos’s influence in their dramatic lighting, superimposed images, rotating and inverted bodies, and combinations of music with close-up faces. Yet Owens transforms that influence through his own private memories, his experience as an African American artist, and images of family and portraiture.
Owens’s filmmaking career came to an end around the age of twenty. According to his own recollections, drug dependency and what was then undiagnosed bipolar disorder began to affect his life, and after an incident in a New York hotel that amounted to something close to a suicide attempt, he left New York in 1971 and returned to Chicago. He never completed another film, and for a long time his work was rarely seen.
When Ed Halter rediscovered Owens’s name in the catalogue of the Filmmakers’ Cooperative in 2009 and got in touch with him, Owens had forgotten that prints of his films still existed. He passed away in 2010, and afterward, through digital preservation work and a number of screenings, his films gradually began to return to audiences. Films that had not fully arrived in their own lifetime, so to speak, returned to the cinema after a long passage of time.
(Park Kyujae)
Program 1 — Saturday, June 27 at 3:00 PM
- Gammelion (Gregory J. Markopoulos, 1968) 55 min, 16mm
Followed by an introduction by Park Kyujae
Program 2 — Saturday, June 27 at 5:00 PM
- Tomorrow’s Promise (Edward Owens, 1967) 45 min, DCP
- Remembrance: A Portrait Study (Edward Owens, 1967) 6 min, DCP
Followed by a talk Antoni Orlof on the Restoration of Eniaios
