Under the banner of ‘film as film’, the absolute cinema of Greek-American Gregory J. Markopoulos (1928–1992) alternates between fixed sequence shots and autonomous photograms. His work is based on portraits of people and places, and partly on adaptations of Hellenic myths. His last epic work, Eniaios (1948–1990, approx. 80 hours), reassembles his earlier films in a new order, combining them with new ones shot for the occasion. Since 2004, the restored work has been screened every four years at Temenos, an open-air utopian projection space in Greece.

Gregory J. Markopoulos. Filmmaker, born in Toledo, Ohio, 1928, died in Freiburg im Breisgau 1992

Sorrows 1969, 16mm, color, opt. sound. 6 min.
“A powerful mood piece, it uses only the light and color emanating from the enclosed surroundings and selected objects… It evokes, without the presence of a single ‘living’ being, the reality of a life or lives, passing yet present, persistent, like a fragrance,reverberating with continued expectation. “ Kirk Winslow
https://www.thetemenos.org/

While Robert Beavers’s body of work ranks among the most revered in the canon of avant-garde cinema, his films are more often spoken or written about than seen. Opportunities to view them here in the U.S. – especially all together – have come around no more than once in a blue moon, with the only large-scale retrospectives on these shores taking place at the Whitney Museum in 2005 and at various venues in the Bay Area in 2009.