I’m sitting in the stone-paved square of Lyssarea, Greece, a village of about twenty residents in the western Arkadia region of the Peloponnese. It’s the final evening of Temenos 2024, and Robert Beavers is talking to the one hundred and fifty of us who have traveled here from various parts of the world to watch the Gregory Markopoulos film Eniaios.
We won’t see the whole thing — it’s eighty hours long — but for four consecutive nights we’ve bused in from the local villages hosting us. Each night, we walk down a winding three-mile path. At a couple of points on the walk, we can see the field where we’re headed, and the screen — a small, white rectangle from here — nestled between hills under the setting sun. We reach the field and settle in to watch three to four hours of Eniaios. Around midnight, we walk back up the long trail and reboard the bus to our village.
Filmmakers, film programmers, and fellow travelers have enacted this ritual every four years between 2004 and 2016, and every two since 2022. In the years between screenings, Beavers and a small group of volunteers restore the next portion of the film. It takes this long because they’ve got their own jobs to work, lives to live, and films to make, and there hasn’t been a lot of funding. On top of that, Eniaios is four thousand times the length of a typical feature film and contains tens of thousands of delicate splices. The years between screenings feel essential to the film and experience; Temenos and its cadence aligning with the formal elements of Eniaios.
Notes from my journal, June 2024, Loutra Iraias, the village where I’m housed:
Presence, Image, Presence
is how it started
where my mind went
out there in the field
On the red bean bag chair that cradled my butt and supported my lower back, sitting semi-upright, just enough to see the screen, throw head back to view —
Darkest sky —
millions of stars
burning on the canvas
Someone’s arm shoots up, points
toward a vanishing streak
Who am I behind and aware of the screen?
Eniaios consists of footage Markopoulos took between 1947 and 1991. The images are predominantly portraits of twentieth-century figures and ancient sites, many cut from his previous films. Film historian P. Adams Sitney writes that Markopoulos would, in some cases, remove frames for Eniaios and discard the originals entirely. I’m taken by the rhythms, and by the portraits of thinkers, writers, and artists, including Beavers himself. The film is organized in twenty-two cycles, or orders, like a series of studies. The figures pose formally in sitting rooms and at their desks, faces looking to the side or beyond the camera. Close-ups of hands. The folds of garments. Lush colors. The male form. Then a stone, maybe, from an ancient Greek site.
These images flash on screen for a single frame (1/24th of a second), up to a few seconds max. They’re couched in longer spans of black or clear leader — a total black screen, then maybe the blink of a white one, an image appears only to be immediately swallowed just as it registers in your mind. There’s no steady cadence to this —
sometimes the black screen lasts for several
seconds
longer than you’d think
other times it’s a blip a flicker
a pulse
There could be an underlying logic to this, or it could be sculpted purely from a place of intuition.
The backdrop of Eniaios is the pitch-black night sky filled with stars. The soundtrack is a chorus of crickets, bird calls, people shifting around, echoes of a distant barking dog, faint music playing in a village miles away, occasional snores among the spectators, and the sound of the projector. In 2022, there was an hours-long delay due to rain. The following night, lightning miles away lit up the sky — a blinking flash in perfect response to the flicker of white against black in the film.
Gregory J. Markopoulos (1928-1992) was a Greek-American filmmaker, a contemporary of Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, and Andy Warhol. He was active in New York avant-garde film circles in the fifties and sixties but grew increasingly disillusioned by American film and art cultures. In 1967, he moved to Europe with his partner, the filmmaker Robert Beavers, pulled all his films from circulation, and refused interviews. In the early seventies, he developed the idea of the Temenos (“sacred space”), as a site for the archives and screenings of the work of Markopoulos and Beavers. He found a screening site in a field outside of Lyssarea, the village where his father was born. For several years in the eighties, Markopoulos and Beavers screened their work there. It was during this time Markopoulos started working on Eniaios. He died in 1992, completing the film but never having a chance to see it projected on screen.
The Temenos that started in 2004 is more the work of Beavers than Markopoulos, along with many individuals who help with arrangements, administration, restoration, projection, and more — and of course, the amalgamation of all who attend. The alchemy is always a little different, but also the same. New people come each year; some are outsiders to avant-garde film and programming circles; or new to the work of Markopoulos. Others can identify precisely from which film each of the images originated; or have been in attendance for every screening, integrating it into their lives for over twenty years. Some pay slightly more for better accommodations while others, at a very low cost, stay in small, shared rooms in guesthouses. Alongside this spirit of openness (which Markopoulos notoriously, or mythologically, did not possess) there is a dedicated commitment to the filmmaker’s original ideals: film as film, and cinema as a sacred form. Beavers and the organizers are not didactic in any way about these matters, but the ethos pervades.
I hear voices in the hallway of the guesthouse
doors open & close
deep into the night & wee hours
of the morning
as pilgrims (what P. Adams calls us, and himself too, as he is among us) wander in late it’s 2am after the bus drops us off or 5am eating souvlaki, drinking ouzo, talking or arguing till the sun comes up or it’s 1am after the screening and we’re walking back up to the bus, cell phone flashlights speckle the dark path —
I find a patch of emptiness and walk alone
in silence while people talk in twos and threes
in front and behind
let my eyes adjust to dark
preserve that fugue state, let the silence,
darkness, figures, stones, sounds, absorb into the mind
A car is coming — maybe they’re transporting equipment back, or people who can’t do the walk. Tires move slowly over dirt; headlights wash the path in light. We stop and move to the side. Sticks from bushes poking legs. We fold back onto the path as the car rolls on. Darkness again. A few minutes later, up ahead, a curve in the path and space in the trees reveal red brake lights — it’s the car again — shadows of figures peel off to allow it through. That once was me, that’s them now, and then it will be others.
I’m sharing a table with Emma, my morning friend. We have coffee and breakfast together each morning — espresso or Greek coffee, fresh squeezed orange juice, an omelet, a stack of pancakes or Greek yogurt with honey (delicious but attracts the bees). We spend this time reading, writing, talking. I say to her: Of all the books I loaded onto my e-reader for this trip, I don’t know why I’ve found myself reading Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book. I’ve never read much of H.D. but now I want to. Emma’s like, oh, I went through a huge H.D. phase, she’s great. I allow myself internet access only while at the café; I look up H.D. and start to read her poems and about her life. “A new cadence means a new idea,” says the Imagist Manifesto of 1914, which H.D. helped to draft.
I learn that she was a regular contributor to the film magazine Close Up, founded by the novelist Bryher and the filmmaker Kenneth Macpherson, lovers of hers and each other. I didn’t know she had a film connection but I’m intrigued. I check out Macpherson’s Wikipedia page and my eyes land on a name: Robert Beavers. Impossible. Beavers, the man who’s sitting just a few feet away from me, here in a tiny village in Greece? Something inexplicable flickers in my psyche.
The next day, Beavers stops at our table. I appreciate how he’ll meander and say hello to whoever’s around. He listens, asks questions, shares stories. I mention my little H.D. journey, where I found his name connected to Macpherson. Beavers doesn’t respond to that in particular, but he asks if I’m familiar with the writer Rebekah Rutkoff. He says she followed H.D.’s footsteps through Corfu, Greece, and writes about H.D. in her book, The Irresponsible Magician. I take down the name for later.
Back home, I go through my list and look up Rutkoff. I find that her essay is not only about H.D. but about H.D. and Markopoulos. She writes, “I think of H.D. and Markopoulos as kindred protectors of the poetics of separation. They prevent overlap and merger between discrete images, and know the importance of singling out frames, symbols and colors in the process of divining, naming and reordering one’s own objects, psychic and material.” I also learn that Rutkoff had been at Temenos too, staying in a different village. I wonder, amused, why Beavers left that part out. And I’m amused at myself — thinking I had landed on an original discovery, only to find that trail already blazed. I order Rutkoff’s slim and great Semiotext(e) book and devour it as soon as it arrives at my place.
The day lolls by. Now it is 3. The bus will return for us at 7:15.
I’m alone in my room in the guesthouse. Sitting outside in the shade all day where everyone else is too means lots of socializing or sitting alone while others socialize. It’s stifling hot in this tiny room but I need a break to recharge. I can hear people coming and going from rooms all hours of the day and night. Doors opening and closing. I overhear someone say they’re going to call a taxi. A day trip to the river, to nearby waterfalls, to Olympia, or to visit one of the other villages where people are staying. I usually like to explore when traveling and consider joining the group, but I decide to stay. I want to protect the sanctity of these days — a time away from time — long, sometimes boring, sometimes awkward and uncomfortable. I don’t want to run from it, or toward some other adventure. Just want to stay here and be.
Eventually, I head back outside and find a table in the shade. I order a freddo espresso (Greek iced coffee) or a Greek salad, or moussaka, or beetroot salad, or whatever appears that day. I read alone or talk to whoever’s around. I sit with Vaibav while others are at the river. We know each other from back home, which is a comfort. I’m reading and he’s writing, we talk a bit and share silences, too. I sit with Simon, a professional violinist from Zurich who I met here in 2022. We talk about the sculptural aspect of poetry. He says he performed with his orchestra at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley last year. Why didn’t you tell me???? I would’ve come to see you. My remark is heartfelt — it feels we’ve known each other forever — but in truth, out there in life, who knows.
I’ve abandoned this essay multiple times. I wanted to write explicitly about CREATION and FORM. I wanted to explore the metaphysical elements of the film (Eniaios) and the gathering that presents it (Temenos) — their autonomous constitutions, their interdependent qualities, the ways they’re romantically entwined. How each one models the ideals and dreams of the other.
We gasp. A moth has flown into the projector and burns, sacrificing itself to the gods of cinema. The film must stop, the projector must be cleaned. Light murmurings ensue, snacks pulled out of bags, glugs from water bottles, the high call of a bird. I adjust my bean bag chair. I add a layer, the night’s getting colder. I look around. I doze off. Some people get up to relieve themselves. There are two porta potties in the back. We’re told to not walk off to pee in the outer bushes because there are snakes.
The projector whirrs back on. We sit, obedient before this masterful work that’s also, frankly, a pain. It’s so controlled, yet so wild. It doms you and it allows you to be perfectly free within it; at times, the whole Temenos experience feels this way, every minute and hour of every day as you wait for the evening screenings to start.
It was Markopoulos’s intention to offer this as a form of divinity, a sacred and religious experience. It’s not for everybody, but I sheepishly confess, it’s made for me. Across all eras and geographies, I look for works made from relentless obsession. No matter how difficult or complicated the humans were who created them. It’s like Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: no reading experience will ever compare. No screening will come close to this. Eniaios and Temenos offer a test of endurance, to be a part of some alchemy, a higher form of communing. I bring fragments of it back with me. Nothing tangible — just sparks and embers.
The final cycles of Eniaios are expected to screen at the 2026 iteration of Temenos, concluding the film's twenty-two year premiere. I wonder if it will continue after. Though Markopoulos only wanted Eniaios to be screened here in Greece, Beavers has allowed parts of the film to start showing in theaters elsewhere. I appreciate the desire to bring Eniaios to new audiences, but I wonder what it would be like to see the film in any context other than this. I'm not against it — having access to a range of viewing experiences is like seeing different articulations of its form, almost enough to become different films. If I had my way, Temenos would go on forever, as it has for the past twenty years. And yet, I’m equally compelled by the alignment between the two — the complete premiere of Eniaios, and its presenting framework Temenos — closing their curtains together, as a single setting sun.
Back in that Lyssarea square, when Beavers addressed us on the final evening in Temenos 2024, he said, “The museums have failed us.” He was asking the group, what other forms exist for the presentation of Eniaios outside of the Temenos experience? How can a film that lasts for more than three days continuously running, one hundred and seventy reels in mass, be presented to the viewing public? I’m drawn to the revolutionary aspirations held in this impossibility. My appreciation of Temenos is also in its elemental formalism. Like Eniaios, Temenos is durational and intermittent, ephemeral and porous, challenging and demanding. It’s beholden to weather conditions, the composition of the participants at any given time, and other intangible and untraceable forces. The museums have failed us, dealing in easily packaged works and closed forms, upholding their service to capital. If an institution becomes the official presenter of Eniaios, the metaphysical relationship between film and form will be broken. Maybe this is inevitable. Whatever’s in store for the decades to come, the enduring love affair between two filmmakers, and between the film and its form, could never be replicated.
Can’t set this writing into a form yet —
on paper in notebook it will stream & flow
continuously, then it will find a shape
~~~~~
A partial list of additional writings on Eniaios, Temenos, Markopoulos, and Beavers:
P. Adams Sitney’s articles:
On Eniaios
On Temenos 2008
On Temenos 2012
On Temenos 2016
On Temenos 2022
On Temenos 2024
On Robert Beavers
Film as Film: The Collected Writings of Gregory J. Markopoulos, edited and published by Mark Webber at The Visible Press.
The Irresponsible Magician: Essays and Fictions, by Rebekah Rutkoff
Double Vision: The Cinema of Robert Beavers, edited by Rebekah Rutkoff
Illuminated Hours: The Early Cinema of Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler, edited by Francisco Algarín Navarro and Carlos Saldaña (San Francisco-based filmmaker Jerome Hiler was roommates with Markopoulos in New York and reflects on him in one of these published interviews.)
Website designed and built by: Companion–Platform
a note On the Dandelion
