21.5.12
ENIAIOS
UPDATE (5/24): GOAL REACHED! ...
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There's only eleven days left to help contribute to the Kickstarter campaign towards the printing of the latest cycles of Markopoulos' dizzying ENIAIOS. To this end I'm collecting bits of ephemera related to ENIAIOS, the late Markopoulos, the Temenos and his tireless partner Robert Beavers in hopes of shedding light on the project for those who may not yet be fully aware of its importance. Thanks to a series of fortunate circumstances I will also be attending the screenings, and hope to have plenty more to post on it in the near future...
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Fred Camper on Markopoulos & ENIAIOS
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(NOTE: a collection of Markopoulos' writings will be available later this year)
from Film Culture No. 44:
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From Film Culture No.46:
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More thoughts from Fred Camper:
"The film was the first section of 'Eniaios' that I have seen. I thought I had known what to expect from the Markopoulos films I have seen that seem related, like 'Gammelion'. But no. Great as 'Gammelion' is, 'Eniaios' is something else. It is as great a film as any I know. There are ways in which it is greater than any I know, in its austere perfection, its demands on the viewer, and the transcendent beauties it wrests from rhythms of black and white, the briefest of images, and the many amazing moments when the images last long enough to show movement. The whole has an almost eternal quality, feeling disconnected from any particular time or from any particular culture. The times when my attention wandered during a few seconds of black, the film would suddenly feel 'destroyed,' in a way that doesn't happen in other great films, which I took to reveal that every frame is perfectly essential.
It is an incredible scandal that this work is not recognized as the towering masterpiece that it is, and that Robert Beavers has to seek funds to continue to print it."
It is an incredible scandal that this work is not recognized as the towering masterpiece that it is, and that Robert Beavers has to seek funds to continue to print it."
Thoughts from Kyle Canterbury:
[on CYCLE II]
"However, 24 days after Eniaios II I still am no closer to attempting to transpose the experience into verbal matter. Instead it's increasingly clear that it entirely resists any of the metaphorical turns language is so prone towards. It is less like anything else than any film I know. In it the medium has metamorphosed into a form that accounts for every part within itself, allows for the utmost flexibility and range of meaning, and needless to say is completely immune to any summarization. Though descriptions of the style on paper might conceivably make the film seem to involve a certain level of complex monotony, in actuality it doesn't have a fixed mode of expression; its available means (and it seems to unlock the secret capabilities of the medium) open endless arrays of possibilities. It's constantly doing something new. This was as much true of Genius, which was shown in its Eniaios-version, occupying the middle three reels of order III, in the second program. In it 'portraits' of three people combine, dominated by surreal hyacinthine and amaranthine colors, into 'alchemic' bonds (Fred's word), but in a way that destroys verbal suggestiveness. One's mind may wander to ponder for a moment the interconnectedness of the images, but the film doesn't, always building what one is tempted to say are architectural models, that release a new form of thinking that at its roots is inseparable from cinema. Though cycle III has a sculptural element, and does something the other two didn't which is shift the images horizontally and vertically, and it's inevitable to think of the film as an immense architecture, such terms are more erroneous than in even most great art.
The beginning of Eniaios II, containing the opening of Ming Green, felt like a world being built from the ground up. Its scatterings later of Mark Turbyfill, Sorrows, portraits from Galaxie, could seem an overture in which all its fragments are intersecting, clustering, dispersing. After two hours The Illiac Passion section begins with short frames of black with wisps of flame and what I can only describe as a cosmic journey taking place on the Brooklyn Bridge. Near its end, the strangest of elliptic fragments of stone and ground in half-light. Again, any kind of metaphor is especially deficient here. A friend said he kept trying to force the film into a birth-memory experience or even a galactic birth and when he let that go is when the film began to explode.
Though by all accounts it must be the most complete film (and certainly how these cycles feel: wholes part of a whole), there's a curious tension to its parts. A cycle is variegated with them: 'movements' or voices in constellation. Worlds in and of themselves, in their expanding scope, they feel on the precipice of breaking off from the others.
It was fascinating to see a program with three sixties works and a part of Eniaios: compared to its all-over totality, they felt fired by an almost nervous impulse, an instability altogether absent in the final work. The way his images have of branching out in the mind or multiplying into an endless series like aligned rows of transforming windows reaching towards infinity, which sometimes I'm tempted to think of almost as a 'raw material' of his films, in Eniaios is something even more inbound, vast and devastating. But I completely love all the others I've seen and, though it seems ridiculous, they are so 'different' in the deepest sense that they lose none of their magic in the context of the later beast."
The beginning of Eniaios II, containing the opening of Ming Green, felt like a world being built from the ground up. Its scatterings later of Mark Turbyfill, Sorrows, portraits from Galaxie, could seem an overture in which all its fragments are intersecting, clustering, dispersing. After two hours The Illiac Passion section begins with short frames of black with wisps of flame and what I can only describe as a cosmic journey taking place on the Brooklyn Bridge. Near its end, the strangest of elliptic fragments of stone and ground in half-light. Again, any kind of metaphor is especially deficient here. A friend said he kept trying to force the film into a birth-memory experience or even a galactic birth and when he let that go is when the film began to explode.
Though by all accounts it must be the most complete film (and certainly how these cycles feel: wholes part of a whole), there's a curious tension to its parts. A cycle is variegated with them: 'movements' or voices in constellation. Worlds in and of themselves, in their expanding scope, they feel on the precipice of breaking off from the others.
It was fascinating to see a program with three sixties works and a part of Eniaios: compared to its all-over totality, they felt fired by an almost nervous impulse, an instability altogether absent in the final work. The way his images have of branching out in the mind or multiplying into an endless series like aligned rows of transforming windows reaching towards infinity, which sometimes I'm tempted to think of almost as a 'raw material' of his films, in Eniaios is something even more inbound, vast and devastating. But I completely love all the others I've seen and, though it seems ridiculous, they are so 'different' in the deepest sense that they lose none of their magic in the context of the later beast."
[on CYCLE V]
"Now the film. Where to begin.... Eniaios has a
religious weight to it. I hope "religious" isn't misleading. But every
moment is made of such quiet intensity, each second has the feeling of
immensity, the same immensity encompassing the whole project, with the
same conviction spread over every frame; with its glorious tapestry of
pure black and white frames holding it all together, and which
throughout the entire 4.5 hour length of the cycle never ceased to feel
_in the process_ of being built and yet fully made all at once, felt as
if it were literally the Law. The images, though they flash before you
in tiny bursts, are never divorced from the cosmic suggestiveness they
contain. Because of the waves of white and black separating each image,
and also each image from itself since it is repeated, each kind of has a
lifespan. And that along with the very brevity in which we glimpse them
creates a ripple of transience within this larger sense of the
infinite. It attains a Zen-like emptiness. The movement is always, as in
even his earlier films, away from matter.
The silence of Eniaios is very particular. Whereas most avant-garde films are silent in order to heighten the visual music of light, color and darkness, the silence of the Markopoulos results almost as if from purging the world of all non-imagery. The effect achieved in images is a little like what Beckett does with sounds actually. It is silence closely related to the reader's silence, to stillness, some painting.
I had only seen "Swain," "Himself as Herself," "Sorrows," and the early trilogy before this. "Sorrows" was clearly as great as any other film I'd ever seen -- I probably would have called it my favorite, or tied it with Straub-Huillet's "Der Tod des Empedokles."
This is far beyond that. In some ways it seems a replacement of all cinema. It's made as if no films had ever been made before. It's well into it that this cycle has its first discernible movement within an image. When I saw it it was if it were the first moving image ever. But really the impact of all the moments which make it up is like that one. The film strings them together like beads into a series of revelations.
I have to echo Fred in saying how unfortunate it is that there hasn't been more recognition and support for Markopoulos's work and obviously Eniaios in particular. Someone on the panel said this has to be the most ambitious film ever made, bar none. It feels miraculous that it even exists."
The silence of Eniaios is very particular. Whereas most avant-garde films are silent in order to heighten the visual music of light, color and darkness, the silence of the Markopoulos results almost as if from purging the world of all non-imagery. The effect achieved in images is a little like what Beckett does with sounds actually. It is silence closely related to the reader's silence, to stillness, some painting.
I had only seen "Swain," "Himself as Herself," "Sorrows," and the early trilogy before this. "Sorrows" was clearly as great as any other film I'd ever seen -- I probably would have called it my favorite, or tied it with Straub-Huillet's "Der Tod des Empedokles."
This is far beyond that. In some ways it seems a replacement of all cinema. It's made as if no films had ever been made before. It's well into it that this cycle has its first discernible movement within an image. When I saw it it was if it were the first moving image ever. But really the impact of all the moments which make it up is like that one. The film strings them together like beads into a series of revelations.
I have to echo Fred in saying how unfortunate it is that there hasn't been more recognition and support for Markopoulos's work and obviously Eniaios in particular. Someone on the panel said this has to be the most ambitious film ever made, bar none. It feels miraculous that it even exists."
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