Gregory J. Markopoulos | Christmas, USA / 1949

denying what you say as it’s being said

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gregory J. Markopoulos (director) Christmas, USA / 1949

 

Gregory J. Markopoulos’ 1949 work, Christmas, USA is a “trance film” that pretends, at least on the surface, to be a film about the central figure’s home life. Critic Adams Sitney has described such films as follows:

 

“These deal with visionary experience, protagonists are somnambulists, the possessed, priests, initiates of some ritual system, characterized by stylized movements of actors, movements that are recreated by camera, protagonist wanders through potent environment (symbolically charged) toward some type of self-realization, some type of confrontation with the self.”

    What Sitney doesn’t explain is that the trance is the necessary effort the individual must experience in order to move from the illusionary world of his childhood experience to the actual adult world of his true sexual identity.

     At the beginning of this completely silent film (shown originally without musical accompaniment) we see a handsome male wanderer in an amusement park, “The Cavalcade of Worlds” wandering through the park through the various rides (a merry-go-round, a Ferris wheel, etc.), through the back alleys of freak shows, and past the dance and music halls of “Little Harlem.” At the same time, our young hero awakens, washing, putting on a fashionable bathrobe, and later shaving. He receives a phone call and speaks for some length.

     We observe another boy wandering, this time through a landscape of trees, dressed in a Japanese robe, lighting what appears to be a ritual lamp, while the boy on the phone continues to play with a letter opener and other nearby objects, which also appear, through Markopoulos’ editing, to be somewhat ritual in nature. Are these the same person, including the man we’ve seen meandering through the amusement park?

 

    The family begins to prepare for the Greek Christmas dinner, the mother vacuuming and cooking, the man’s sister reading a book. The ritual Greek foods are laid upon the table.

      The young man enters his house again, this time exiting, candle in hand, in great determination, walking through the industrial fields under a freeway and across a railroad track to encounter another man, shirtless with a beautifully chiseled body. With the candle held high, he greets the stranger, who clearly is a kind of Christ, who with the fervent recognition of his powers, backs up against the landscape before falling in an obviously re-enactment of the crucifixion, the boy playing the role of the Marys in holding the crucified body.

      The hero returns home, as does the father. Christmas dinner is observed, but soon after, to the apparent shock of family members, the young boy puts on a hooded jacket and leaves the house in what appears to be a final farewell.

      Clearly the sleeping figure at the beginning of this film has, through the encounter with his own Christ, come to a recognition of his own being, of his own sexuality which can no longer be contained within the confines of the home in which he lived. The last date, January 1, 1950, seems to declare a date of recognition and freedom. The young boy of the film has become a gay man, and in that representation focuses his film on what might be described as the third “coming out” film of the late 1940s, which I have designated as the version A of coming out movies, the pattern having been already established, strangely, by Markopoulos’s Los Angeles friends, Curtis Harrington and Kenneth Anger.

 

Los Angeles, July 5, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2015).