Gregory J. Markopoulos
Director · 1928 – 1992 · Toledo, Ohio
Gregory J. Markopoulos (March 12, 1928 - November 12, 1992) was an American experimental filmmaker. Born in Toledo, Ohio to Greek immigrant parents, Markopoulos began making 8 mm films at an early age. He attended USC Film School in the late 1940s, and went on to become a co-founder — with Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, Stan Brakhage and others — of the New American Cinema movement. He was as well a contributor to Film Culture magazine, and an instructor at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1967, he and his partner Robert Beavers left the United States for permanent residence in Europe. Once ensconced in self-imposed exile, Markopoulos withdrew his films from circulation, refused any interviews, and insisted that a chapter about him be removed from the second edition of Visionary Film, P. Adams Sitney's seminal study of American avant-garde cinema. While he continued to make films, his work went largely unseen for almost 30 years.
Movies15
Movie7.3DocumentaryAlso known as Walden, Jonas Mekas’s first diary film is a six-reel chronicle of his life in 1960s New York, interweaving moments with family, friends, lovers, and artistic idols. Blending everyday encounters with portraits of the avant-garde art scene, it forms an epic, personal meditation on community, creativity, and the passage of time.
Diaries, Notes, and Sketches
1968 · 32 votes
Movie7.0DocumentaryJonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.
Birth of a Nation
1997 · 4 votes
- Movie
Includes 'portraits' of Marianne Faithfull, Thelonious Monk and 28 others, some known, some less so.
Heads
1969
- Movie7.5Documentary
In 1964 Film Culture magazine chose Andy Warhol for its annual Independent Film award. The plan was to show some of Andy's films and have Andy come on stage and hand him the award. Andy said, no, he didn't want a public presentation.
Award Presentation to Andy Warhol
1964 · 2 votes
MovieDocumentaryMy Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure is a film cycle by American avant-garde filmmaker Robert Beavers. It consists of eighteen films in three parts. The films were made from the late 1960s through the early 2000s in different European countries, particularly Greece, Switzerland, and Italy. Most of the works in the cycle are radically re-edited, condensed versions of the original films. The cycle premiered in its entirety in 2005.
Movie4.3DramaFantasyPrometheus, on an Odyssean journey, crosses the Brooklyn Bridge in search of the characters of his imagination. After meeting the Muse, he proceeds to the "forest." There, under an apple tree, he communes with his selves, represented by celebrated personages from the New York "underground scene" who appear as modern correlatives to the figures of Greek mythology. The filmmaker, who narrates the situations with a translation of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, finds the personalities of his characters to have a timeless universality.
The Illiac Passion
1967 · 7 votes
Movie6.3DocumentaryShot in Florence, the film draws on Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks and Paul Valéry’s essay on da Vinci’s creative process to explore parallels between Renaissance space and the moving image. Beavers employs rapid pans and tilts along the city’s facades, interspersed with glimpses of his own face, linking camera movement to the filmmaker’s investigative gaze. The work marks a turning point in his practice, foregrounding presence and perception as central to his method. (Note: The film was re-edited and re-released in 1999.)
From the Notebook of...
1972 · 14 votes
Movie7.0In 1963 Boultenhouse wrote, produced, and directed Dionysius,which he described as a “free treatment of Euripides' The Bacchae.”It starred the dancers Louis Falco, Anna Duncan, and Nicolas Magallanes as Dionysius, Agave, and Pentheus respectively, and the experimental filmmakers Charles Levine, Willard Maas, Gregory Markopoulos, Marie Menken, Lloyd Williams and William Wood as the Chorus of Cameras. The film's score was by Teiji Ito.
Dionysus
1964 · 2 votes
Movie6.8DocumentaryDistilled in 1996 from an earlier 50-minute trilogy, this film was shot in Greece and Austria and structured around two recurring intertitles, “He said” and “he said.” Each introduces delicate studies of light and place—hotel interiors, cafés, hillsides, storefronts, and street life—framed in parallel variations. The title invokes Apollo as savior and healer.
Sotiros
2000 · 4 votes
Movie6.5DocumentaryFilmed in Rome in the 1980s, the work draws on Borromini’s Baroque architecture and Il Sassetta’s St. Martin and the Beggar. Beavers contrasts winter’s subdued light with the verdant growth of spring, constructing a precise montage in which image and sound form a poetic dialogue.
The Hedge Theater
2002 · 10 votes
Movie8.0DocumentaryFilmed when Beavers was 18–19, this self-portrait depicts him and Gregory J. Markopoulos in their Swiss apartment. A diary of domestic life, it transforms everyday objects and intimate details into a charged meditation on love, memory, and desire.
Early Monthly Segments
2003 · 1 votes
Movie6.8DramaSwain is inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Fanshawe, features a dreamlike narrative of a young man’s ritualized rejection of heterosexuality, as a mysterious woman in white gossamer pursues him through a ruined landscape.
Swain
1950 · 5 votes
Movie7.0DocumentaryBeavers intercuts scenes of traffic in Bern with details from the 15th-century altarpiece The Martyrdom of St. Hippolytus. In its revised form, the film gains a psychodramatic intensity, juxtaposing Markopoulos in shafts of light with a torn self-portrait and recurring shots of a shattered windowpane.
The Painting
1972 · 1 votes
- Movie8.0
Shot in thirty-two hours at the abandoned Baybridge Theater in Brooklyn, in cinemascope and Eastman color. The film was based on the one-act play of the same name by George Christopoulos, who also commissioned it.
The Death of Hemingway (An Obituary Fantasy)
1965 · 1 votes
Movie8.0DramaMarkopoulos’ first attempt at making a 35mm feature film, clearly inspired by the cinema of Jean Cocteau, was left unfinished and the materials were lost for many years.
The Dead Ones
1967 · 1 votes