Markopoulos

Still appears in original article.

1. Presentation of The Illiac Passion by Gregory Markopoulos. (Louvain, 1968.)

I am in a very peculiar mood this evening, because this afternoon, I presented The Illiac Passion to a distributor at Columbia Pictures and one of the questions he posed to me is: “You want to be a film director, and this is your first film?”

I do not know to what extent you have been informed of the kind of film that is presented to you this evening. This is not a commercial film. One could call it an avant-garde or experimental film, or a “New American” film, or “Underground”, or more naturally an entirely independent film. I made the film myself, I photographed it, I produced it, I chose the twenty-eight performers myself, this film was made like a writer who writes his book or a painter who paints his canvas. I worked with a very simple 16mm Bolex camera, exposure meter and tripod. There is no assistant of any kind.

This film was in fact conceived many years ago, at the time when I studied at the University of Southern California’s Cinema department. At that time, I was intrigued by a Greek play, Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus. Some years later, around 1964, I had 2000 dollars, thanks to the festival of Knokke-le-Zoute where another one of my films, Twice a Man, obtained the Prix Lambert. Thus, I decided to shoot my Promethean film.

For the film, I only retained three of the characters from the play: Prometheus, the central character, Poseidon, who is played by the pop artist Andy Warhol, and Io, a mythical character transformed into a heifer by Hera, the wife of Zeus, because of her jealousy. These three characters do not have a name in the film. Around these three characters, I made sequences with twenty-four or twenty-five other characters, let us call them background characters. These characters were borrowed from Greek myths. For example, after the introduction of the main hero crossing the Brooklyn Bridge at the beginning of the film, the first sequence is about the theme of narcissism, which is natural to address first because it is close to the problem of artistic creation. Another thing that is good to know: throughout the film, the author, myself, appears. One day, it seemed that a group of people considered that a detailed introduction of the film would have been necessary, giving the explanations that I am giving you, and to also say that the film is the Odyssean journey of a film director. That would be very nice and very easy for the public, but why would it be said in advance? When you see a painting by DeKooning, by Pollock, by Picasso, you are not told what it is, perhaps it bears a title, which is the privilege of the one who creates, but you were not told what it was. To reveal something, especially in art, is, according to me, to depreciate, and it is even offensive for the spectator. Thus, in this film, you will see twice the creator of the film, once in the stairs, climbing it in a lateral manner while holding a sort of small instrument in hand. To this image is superimposed that of a tree with a heap of birds. What I am in fact in the process of doing is measuring the light for this sequence. Then there is another series of shots where I am again sat on the stairs with my scenario. It is again a simple affirmation of my presence.

A last story, for which I have to digress a little. At the time when, several years ago, I had conceived of the film, I was very interested in the work of Gordon Craig. He wrote in his journal that the natural costume for whatever actor or actress in the theatre was the one in which he or she was created, in other words, naked. Thus I decided, my subject being taken from Greek myths, to employ this idea. Not that it is original, but I had no doubt been the first to use it without censorship problems. Throughout the film characters appear nude, both men and women. And this is probably little different from what was done during the Renaissance in painting. In the cinema, it is often a problem to show nudity. There is of course the commercial cinema which does so to attract the people. I did not do it in this spirit. I did it because I thought it was what needed to be done. And I deliver it to you as such.

One more thing, the soundtrack. It is very different from what you must have heard. I had to create a soundtrack that adapts to this film in particular. I had read several translations and the Greek text of Aeschylus’ play, and in the Morgan Library of New York I discovered a copy of the translation by the American poet Thoreau and I had it photocopied. I read the whole play in front of a microphone, interpreting all of the parts as if it were a single person. There were archaic parts in the text, I eliminated them. The film starts with the word “I”: it’s me, it is precisely the filmmaker who is speaking. Sometimes there are words that I repeat, or long phrases, sometimes also short phrases. When the image-editing was finished, I placed the resulting soundtrack over the images. But I didn’t synchronize anything, and remarkable things were produced: certain words fell into certain places, and when the image and the word fall together, they seemed to be put together voluntarily. It is something that pleases me very much and which was done in the commercial cinema by Jean Cocteau for his film La Belle et la Bête. Cocteau asked Auric to do the soundtrack for this film without showing it to him, solely telling him, as he wrote in his film journal, that the film had a duration of X minutes. Then the music was glued to the film, and all sorts of marvelous things were produced. I don’t claim that it is the way of adding sound to a film, each filmmaker works in a different way. But for me it is very interesting and I continue to do it in this way. I believe in certain “accidents”.

2. Interview with Markopoulos

Question: Your shots in this film are very rigorously composed from a plastic point of view…

Markopoulos: It is because I have always been interested in painting. I did not study it in a school, but I have admired and seen paintings innumerable times. I read a lot of things about the painters.

Question: Would you like to make a film with only fixed shots?

Markopoulos: This question pleases me because for the moment, in Bruxelles, I am editing a film shot in Italy named Gammelion, and nothing really happens in it, it is made up of views of a castle. It is a 66 meter long film, because I didn’t have any more film. There are no characters, except in the frescoes from where I introduce them. All the shots in it are static, without movement.

Question: You often use black between two shots…

Markopoulos: You mean the fades to black – fades in? Upon finishing the film, I used them because I considered them very important for the form of The Illiac Passion. I had made another film, Eros, O Basileus, with a single character filmed in an apartment on the Bowery. There I had made long shots of him sitting at a desk, not doing anything. Then I cut the film in four parts, each framed by a fade in and a fade to black. This does not harm the rhythm in any way. Each fade can be seen as the end of a verse or of a paragraph. And I even discovered then that the parts in black contain in a certain sense as much material as the real images. I believe that this is very effective, and that I will employ it again.

Question: I had the impression while watching the film that it was speeding up towards the end.

Markopoulos: It is very curious because, the other day, someone said to me that they had the opposite impression. I cannot decide.

Question: What do you think of cinema with characters, a story, etc.?

Markopoulos: It was a way of making films at one time, and certainly people will continue to make them this way as long as the cinema will exist. But, as you know, there are other ways of making them that are perhaps more valuable. Most film directors have a script or a dialogue because it is the only way of communicating with the majority of the public, that is at least what they think. And from this dialogue they have to make very many shots for it to become interesting. And now, they believe to have discovered the new cinema, because it speaks and speaks. Particularly in France. But good new cinema is not about having a good dialogue.

Question: What do you think of Godard’s films?

Markopoulos: I have not seen them all. La Chinoise is certainly one of the best films in the world. But at the same time I think that it is terrible. It is at once inspired and trafficked. I would have preferred to see it solely inspired. Whatever that may signify for Godard on the political level, it would be better if it was not arranged, but simply what he thinks. That is very difficult to do, because in the case of Jean-Luc Godard, the films are intended for the public.

Question: Do you think that the public could receive your films? Accept them?

Markopoulos: A gentleman from Columbia considered that Illiac… could not be commercially distributed, but only shown to small groups like here. I answered that at Knokke the public remained seated, and that it received the film very well. I believe that if my film was well distributed, there would have been no reason for the people not to go see it. This is also equally true for the films of Brakhage, Ron Rice, and of a big number of filmmakers. But no one dares to do it. One will have to wait about ten years. This brings another problem for me: what should I do so that my films are shown in public? Perhaps making them in 8mm.

Question: Talk to us about your other films.

Markopoulos: Ming Green is a short film, a real documentary about my New York apartment that I abandoned to come live in Europe. I made it in one day. Himself as Herself was inspired by the Balzac novella Séraphita. The film was made in two weeks for 300 dollars. Gordon Baldwin, the actor, did not know what he played, did not know that the character was inspired by Balzac, and was a hermaphrodite. I do not say it clearly, but I allow it to be thought. The finished film costed 1500 dollars, which is very little. I made my first film at the age of twelve. It is a three-minute version of Dickens’ Christmas Carol. I then made a bunch of films in eight or sixteen millimeters, which have all been destroyed. Apart from Christmas Carol, the first of which a copy remains is a trilogy. The first part is called Psyche, the next Lysis, and the third Charmides. After that, I was about 19 years old, I made The Dead One, my first film in 35mm, which runs for about 45 minutes. Then Swain, with film found by Robert C. Freeman Jr. Then Flowers of Asphalt, very short, black and white, and Eldora. After which I stayed a long time without shooting, a lack of money. I spent 4 or 5 years in Greece, trying to make a film in color 35mm, Serenity, which was never finished; there are some pieces left somewhere, but I do not know where, I do not have the negative. Next I made Twice a Man, followed by The Illiac Passion, Galaxie, Himself as Herself and Through a Lens Brightly: Mark Turbyfill. Last year, passing through Greece, I made a short film, Bliss, dedicated to the Byzantine decoration of a church on the island of Hydra.

Image from the production of Serenity. The image in the original article couldn't be identified, this is a replacement image from the same time.

Question: It seems that, in The Illiac Passion, you have a non-unitary conception of the “character”...

Markopoulos: In fact, there is a character who appears in the beginning, and all the others are in some way the molecules which he is composed of: or even, all of his passions. But you are right, it would without a doubt be better to show Illiac… without all of these interruptions.

Question: Have you used the “black” in other films?

Markopoulos: It is the equivalent of a comma or a semicolon in a text. If one leaves black between a fade to black and a fade in, the spectator’s attention becomes necessarily concentrated. So this is what I did in Eros, O Basileus, between two identical shots of a character sitting without doing anything at a desk.
I believe that it is a technique that would be particularly adapted to educational films.

Question: There are certain words that always come back on the same images and the same themes.

Markopoulos: It is true. I knew the film when I made the soundtrack, and when I came up with keywords, I repeated them. Thus, the word “speak” is found in three crucial points in the film. But it is still half by chance, because when one arranges something too deliberately, it never works. Look at the educational films.

Question: What is the music that you use, and why?

Markopoulos: The main reason is that this music of Bela Bartok contains groups of voices, and one single voice at the beginning and the end, which goes with the idea of a Promethean character.

Question: Do you prepare by writing what you are going to film?

Markopoulos: Not exactly. I do research before shooting, I accumulate notes. I researched everything I could about the character of Prometheus.

Question: Do you leave a lot of liberty for your actors?

Markopoulos: I generally leave the actors themselves to form a certain idea about the character that they embody. This very often gives unexpected results, and which I generally accept by integrating them into the film. Very often they invent their dialogue themselves, in complete improvisation.

Question: Do you think you have been subject to the influence of other filmmakers? In particular that of Eisenstein for the editing?

Markopoulos: I don’t think so. One must edit, and often edit short. But everyone has to reinvent a montage that suits his own language. Perhaps I have been influenced by someone like Stroheim. And I have a great veneration for Sternberg, of whom I had been a student. And I had seen the works of certain American filmmakers like Lang or Hitchcock always with the idea that there was something to take from them for one’s own use present in my spirit.

Question: What relationships do you see between the story at the level of the scenario and the finished, completely edited film?

Markopoulos: The scenario is a story. Filming is to first tell this story. But the cinematographic medium obliges you to bend to it. Shooting different sequences is no longer exactly telling. For me and for many others, the film is first and foremost film. To edit is to create on yet another level, with another medium to your disposal. And then there is the first real viewing of the film: when you receive the first copy. At each of these four levels, the film passes through a new stage of creation.
Of course, one can improvise, if at least one knows how to handle a camera, which I would like to explain to anyone in ten minutes. Next one can cut the film in pieces, and glue them together and do all sorts of things with them. As for knowing if this will have an interest, and an artistic authenticity, that is another matter. That depends on personal work. There are several ways to construct a film. Do you know Burroughs? He takes pages, superimposes them, and this creates something. The story does not necessarily need a beginning and an end. In other terms, a story does not necessarily need a story. There is a story here and now: I could make a film with what we are in the process of doing here, at this precise moment. It could be a story in the traditional sense, but it would also be a story of the emotions of the people in the room, and their reactions.
Someone like Rossellini, according to me, is a very good filmmaker, but who for certain reasons, which I suppose are of an economic order, is obliged to work in the commercial cinema. But in his first films, he was not yet totally in this system. In Rome, Open City, he permitted himself to do his dialogue under the spotlights, and to suddenly tell Anna Magnani, when he couldn’t find the words of the dialogue: “Do something”. And she did it. In my opinion, he thus made the first “underground” film.
I believe that everywhere, the best are the youth, in Italy, in Germany, everywhere. The others do not mean anything to me. They work with sad, bad rules, always with compromises. Even someone like Godard makes compromises, because he has to worry about budget problems. If I was a producer, and gave you 100,000 dollars telling you to do what you like, I believe that you would have much more difficulty than if I did not give you anything at all. Money only makes you avoid the smallest problems, compared to the ones that it creates for you, the concessions that it forces you to make. The only problem now for the young filmmakers of the entire world is that they cannot see the films that each other makes. One must hope that one day, there will be international centres of cinema, in all the countries, where everyone will be able to see the films of everyone. Perhaps Belgium would be a good “home” for this independent cinema. If the first international centre of cinema was created here, it would not be anything but a magnificent beginning. (Comments collected by Paul Potters.)