Other Galaxies: The Temenos Beyond the Screen

Healing takes place in the impasse / the sickness passes¹

—Eleni Stecopoulos

In mid-March of this year, I met Eleni Stecopoulos, a San Francisco-based poet, for breakfast in Tribeca. We had met briefly, years ago, and discovered a shared interest in the crossroads of ancient Greek medicine and poetry. Our March meeting was again short—Eleni told me about her new book-in-progress, "Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing," and we anticipated speaking more in late June. We both planned to attend the Temenos, an event in the Peloponnese dedicated to the presentation of Gregory Markopoulos's site-specific film Eniaios (c. 1947–1991).² The Temenos, like Eleni's book, is grounded in the poetics of healing: Markopoulos devoted much of his life to probing the curative possibilities of cinema. I recall placing a bottle of hand sanitizer between Eleni and me on the cafe table, but the pandemic was still about a week away from functioning as the determining fact and force of everything, a life-organizing principle.

By late April, Robert Beavers—a filmmaker, Markopoulos's long-time partner, and the Temenos organizer—informed attendees that the event was cancelled. "When I glance at the names of our guests and think of the variety and vitality that you represent as a group, it is with much regret. On the other hand, the current uncertainty makes the organization of the screenings for an international public nearly impossible. The priority is for us to be well and plan for next year," he wrote.

Filmmaker-Physician

Every four years since 2004, spectators have gathered in a field in the Peloponnese to watch newly restored portions of Eniaios—the silent 80-hour film Markopoulos had fully edited but not yet printed when he died in 1992.

Eniaios—ancient Greek for "unity" and "uniqueness"—is his magnum opus, designed exclusively for this remote location near his ancestral village, Lyssaraia. Composed of re-edited footage from most of his previous films and material from dozens of new films (works he'd edited in the 1970s but never printed), Eniaios is meant to supersede them all as an integrated epic work. Markopoulos spent the last decade of his life editing the nonnarrative film, using shots of

Figure 1.

Markopoulos editing Eniaios c. 1989/1990. Photo by Robert Beavers. Courtesy Temenos Archive.

minuscule duration—many just one or a few frames in length, each separated from the next by lengths of black and clear leader. His method confounds conventions of filmic legibility and motion; Eniaios speaks in a dialect of rhythmic pulsation that is itself in dialogue with the shifting forms of a vast Arcadian sky. The unit of the single frame was the unplumbed essence of film for Markopoulos: "Who can dare to imagine what a single frame might contain? What future process could activate a single frame?"³

Born in Toledo, Ohio, to Greek parents in 1928, Markopoulos began to make ambitious narrative films in the late 1940s—psychosexual quests and romantic meditations sprung from ancient and poetic texts. He briefly studied film production at the University of Southern California (attending von Sternberg's lectures and watching Lang and Hitchcock on Hollywood sets), returned to Toledo, and traveled to Europe—all the while making films—before settling in New York in 1960 with an international reputation as an avant-garde filmmaker. He was a founding member of Jonas Mekas's New American Cinema Group and subsequent Film-Makers' Cooperative, a vivid voice via frequent essays in Film Culture and Film Comment, and a mentor to young filmmakers.

But Markopoulos grew critical of the role of institutions and non-artists ("Art World Families," "the PhD set") in impinging on the truest interests of filmmakers and their films. He had met Beavers (b. 1949) in New York in 1965; in 1967, they left for Europe and spent the next decades there—until Markopoulos's death—as an itinerant, institution-shunning society-of-two. Markopoulos gradually removed his films from distribution, intent on controlling the conditions under...