AFW + NFSA #59: Lysis, Swain, Gammelion. Three by Gregory Markopoulos

7:30pm Tuesday 30 May 2023
The Brunswick Green, 313/315 Sydney Road, Brunswick
$10 tickets on the door. 16mm projection.

For almost 30 years after Gregory Markopoulos left the United States in 1967, his films and presence were hardly known at all. It was only after Markopoulos’ passing in 1992, when his lifelong partner, Robert Beavers, founded Temenos Inc., a non-profit organization devoted to the preservation of Markopoulos and Beavers' own work. Markopoulos is now regarded by critics and academics as a pivotal figure of New American Cinema. Still now, in the modern age of streaming and file sharing, the majority of Markopoulos’ work remains largely inaccessible to the general public. Markopoulos’ extremely personal and cerebral approach to film separates him from many of his experimental colleagues. Semi-narrative threads and notions of memory, desire and creativity are woven through delicately crafted textures and otherworldly superimpositions to create a hypnotic, almost trance-like experience, where we gradually become immersed in the complex web of Markopoulos’ subconscious.

Films:

Lysis, 1948, 24 min, colour, sound
"A study in stream-of-consciousness poetry of a lost, wandering, homosexual soul. There is a symbolic birth in the opening scene; the wanderings; the reincarnations of one soul into a still greater soul, until in the final cycle the soul of immortality or of understanding is given to the wanderer; we see him going toward the far city."

Swain, 1950, 20 min, colour, sound
An evocation of a subconscious rejection of the stereotyped masculine role. In a flight of fantasy, the isolated protagonist moves on a trance like journey of poetic action toward a climactic scene of self-realization.

Gammelion, 1967, 55 min, colour, sound
Gammelion takes its title from the months in the ancient Greek calender suitable for marriage. Short image clusters shot at the Castle Roccasinabalde are slowly faded in and out of black and clear leader. The soundtrack which is predominantly silent includes the reading by the filmmaker of two passages on the meaning of love.

We respectfully acknowledge that the land on which AFW holds its screenings was never ceded by the Kulin Nation.