Eniaios
Gregory Markopoulos
Quadrennial outdoor projection of 16 mm-films from the 80-hour cycle of films by Gregory Markopoulos made between 1947 and 1991. Site-specific: Lyssarea, Greece
In 1967, filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos left the United States, along with his partner and fellow filmmaker Robert Beavers, to live and work in Europe. In the early 1970s, he began to withdraw his films from circulation. After living in various places in Europe, they returned often to Greece for the annual screenings in Arcadia. There he found a site, which he dubbed the Temenos, or “Sacred Grove,” where—and only there—he felt his work could be adequately shown. He took many of his older films and his newer work and turned them into a single film work that lasts about eighty hours, “incorporating some one hundred individual films that are organized into twenty-two cycles (or ‘film orders’) of two to five hours each. Its title is Eniaios, meaning both ‘unity’ and ‘uniqueness,’” (Webber, 14). At the Temenos, different orders of the cycle are projected over a three-day weekend to whomever takes the time to travel there. Work is still being done to restore the remaining cycles. The next screening will take place in 2020. (Arturo Silva)
Gregory Markopoulos, born in Toledo, Ohio (USA) in 1928, died in 1992 in Freiburg im Breisgau (Germany)
Video
References
Erika Balsom, “A Pilgrimage to the Peloponnese: Gregory Markopoulos, Eniaios and the Temenos,” in Lola, No. 3, 2012, http://www.lolajournal.com/3/temenos.html.
Mark Webber, Film as Film, The Collected Writings of Gregory Markopoulos (London:The Visible Press, 2014).