Towards the Temenos: Gregory Markopoulos' Eniaios

Conceivably the most demanding and intransigent of all twentieth-century film projects, Eniaios was a monumental re-editing of the nearly one hundred films that Gregory Markopoulos had made over the course of his five-decade career. Completed just before Markopoulos’ death in 1992, the film was divided into twenty-two cycles running for three to five hours each, with a total estimated projection time of nearly eighty hours. Even more remarkable than its length was its dependence on the particular characteristics of its screening environment, the “Temenos,” located in Lyssaraia, a small hilly area on the western side of the Peloponnese. By choosing the mythic birthplace of lyric poetry and the home to ancient houses of healing as the site for his Temenos, Markopoulos acknowledged that one of its functions was to isolate the viewer from the vagaries of ordinary time, allowing one to reconnect with the rhythms of the natural world. In form and scale, Eniaios could not be more ambitious, and its utopian aspirations are linked to both its radical reworking of film aesthetics and the unique harmonization of viewing space and image made possible at the Temenos. This special event will provide an extremely rare chance for members of the Yale community to see parts of this project alongside some of Markopoulos’ earlier films

Speaker: WHC Auditorium, 53 Wall St