Films by Gregory J. Markopoulos
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Twice a Man contains no synchronized dialogue–only fragments of speech along with music–and the film’s rapid editing conjoins different time periods. As scholar P. Adams Sitney wrote in 1970: “Past, present, and future, dream and waking, are so fused that they dissolve as distinct categories.” Early in the film Paul (Paul Kilb), a handsome young man clearly alienated from the heterosexuality represented by dancing couples, stands on the roof of a Manhattan building as if contemplating suicide, his foot a bit over the edge. A man identified in the titles as the artist physician (Albert Torgesen) appears and places a hand on Paul’s shoulder, summoning him back from the brink. Paul then visits his mother on Staten Island, where he encounters her both as a young woman (Olympia Dukakis, in her first film role) and an old one (Violet Roditi). Once Paul enters her house, she begins her fragmented talk with “Why do you keep seeing…?” In Markopoulos’s original plan, which included synchronized dialogue, this was to have been “Why do you keep seeing the physician?”
“Color is eros,” Markopoulos wrote in a note on Psyche, and this is true of Twice a Man as well: the images are sensuous fields as charged with desire as a lover’s skin. New York has never seemed more lush; heightening the intensity is the way that compositions dominated by particular colors and textures–the overexposed surface of an office building, the rich lavender of a wall in the mother’s house–are intercut with images of contrasting hues. Anticipating his later work, Marko-poulos suggests that it’s not necessary to have a character on-screen in order to sense the human presence: these characters’ essences seem to spill over into the landscape shots they’re intercut with–and vice versa.
Key to understanding this effect, and Markopoulos’s work as a whole, is recognizing his gradual abandonment in the 60s of editing inspired by the on-screen drama, editing meant to anticipate events and create expectation in the viewer. While the 1947 Psyche, based on an unfinished novella by Pierre Louys, has some sense of narrative, of moving toward new incidents and new terrain, in Twice a Man that sense is limited to individual scenes–Paul’s entry into his mother’s house, for example, is preceded by a point-of-view shot of the house. What’s more important than drama in Twice a Man is the feeling that each of its images affects every other. At every moment the film is a matrix of connections between shots, connections sensed as simultaneous: Paul is at once trapped by his mother and saved by the artist physician, at once achingly alive and already dead. This impression of simultaneity is even stronger in Sorrows: we know that the architectural details we see will remain even when we’re shown something else, and the layers of superimpositions and fade-ins and fade-outs make each thing seem to linger. The characters and places in Markopoulos’s later films (some of which are portraits of people) are not becoming anything–they seem eternal almost from the outset.
