sound
without sight
by Douglas Messerli
Gregory J. Markopoulos
(director) Twice a Man / 1963
I’d guess that most
ordinary filmgoers would be utterly confused and bored if they might stumble
across the difficult-to-find film by US gay experimental filmmaker Gregory J.
Markopoulos’ Twice a Man from 1963. Any film that begins with a
4.44-minute leader in black accompanied only by the sound of a heavy rain
pelting the concrete streets of Manhattan to be followed with images sometimes
held in suspension for long moments and at other times interspliced with quick
blimps and glimpses of hands, heads, profiles, along with numerous
unidentifiable objects, and quick cuts of four unnamed individuals, two men and
two women represented as variations of the same being in different modalities
of time, the whole accompanied by silence interspersed with an overlaying
babble of various languages, notably French, and occasional English-language
words and names such as “Paul,” and—cut between periods of static—parts of
sentences such as “earth...lies...in...darkness” and “ "Why do you keep
seeing . . . ?"—doesn’t exactly encourage the average movie lover.
Add to this the problem of the fact that
when I had when I finally, after years of searching, stumbled across the title
in the UBU Web archive, it was obviously pirated from a German TV broadcast
captured by a VHS video recording before being transferred to the DVD in which
the images are often unintentionally wobbly and most of Markopoulos’ heralded
color images are faded, a final assault against the film appearing near its end
on a horizontal trailer announcing “‘Warhol privat’ beginnt um 0.25 uhr.”
You can be assured that if spirits truly
exist, the director has turned many times over in his grave—if, in fact, he was
buried and not cremated by his lover Robert Beavers in Freiburg, Germany where
in 1992 he died. Yet, in part, Markopoulos himself has to be blamed for this
situation.
After attending the University of
Southern California, Markopoulos went on to establish himself as one remarkable
film makers and theorists, along with Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, and Stan
Brakhage who together came to be called the New American Cinema movement.
Markopoulos was soon contributing to major film journals, Film Culture, Film
Comment, Filmcritica, and The Village Voice, becoming well
known in US experimental cinema circles.
After a year in Greece, Markopoulos taught
at the Art Institute of Chicago having begun making some of his most notable
early films, including the trilogy Du sang de la volupte et de la morte
(Psyche, Lysis, and Charmides) (1947-1948), The Dead
Ones (1948), Christmas, U.S.A. (1949), Swain
(1950), Flowers of Asphalt (1951), Eldora (1953), Serenity
(1961), Twice a Man (1963), Galaxie (1966), Ming Green
(1966), Bliss (1967), Eros, O Basileus (1967), Himself As
Herself (1967), and The Illiac Passion (1964–67). By the late 1960s
Markopoulos’ films were attracting wide attention among film critics open to
the experimental, and by 1974 the noted commentator of the American avant-garde
cinema, P. Adams Sitney, devoted an entire chapter to his work in Visionary
Film (1974).
The difference between Markopoulos’ work
from someone like Brakhage’s films, however, was not only in how Markopoulos
used radical disjuncture along with formal patterns to create mythic
narratives, but in the fact that the former was committed to employing
homoerotic images and portraying gay and lesbian figures through classical
mythology.
I have long argued that the early
1960s, the very years when I was coming of age, were far more nervous about
issues of homosexuality or even more outrightly homophobic than were the late
1940s and 1950s. If throughout the late 40s and 1950s gay cineastes felt that
they had to deeply encode their messages about their sexuality and portrayed
the “coming out” experience as something close to a spiritual suicide, often
faced with the possibility as was Kenneth Anger and John Schmitz, that the
theater showing their films might be raided and the work confiscated, or even
as in the infamous case of Allen Ginsberg’s 1956 publication of Howl,
force to challenge the book’s censorship by going to court, nonetheless there
was a growing outspokenness throughout that earlier decade that may not have
altered life in Moline, Illinois, but certainly had begun to change views in
major US urban centers.
Indeed, the relative success of artists
whose careers were forged in the late 1940s and 1950s meant that in the early
1960s homosexual figures such as Virgil Thompson, Aaron Copland, Leonard
Bernstein, Samuel Barber, Gian-Carlo Menotti, John Cage, and others in music
and Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Truman Capote, Arthur
Laurents, Carson McCullers, James Baldwin, Gore Vidal, Jane Bowles, John
Cheever, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, Allen Ginsberg, and numerous such
literary figures, to say nothing of hundreds of visual artists and dancers
lived relatively openly as gays and lesbians,* paved the way for younger
figures such as Edward Albee, Stephen Sondheim, John Ashbery, Susan Sontag,
Irene Maria Fornes, and even Andy Warhol, to name but a few.
In the early 1960s, however, as Michael
J. Sherry has argued in his 2007 publication Gay Artists in Modern America:
An Imagined Conspiracy there was a radical shift. As I wrote of that book
in an essay in My Year 2008: In the Gap, Sherry, “while determining that
American culture was perhaps consistently homophobic,” posited
there were significant
changes from the early post-war era—a
period in which, while
there were occasional police raids and
other publicized
“outings” of gay figures, there was no “outright”
denial of gay talent nor
an outright assault—to the mid-1960s
when he [Sherry] argues,
there was a near-unified belief that
homosexuality was not
only a corruption of American values
but a real threat to
American power.
Citing significant examples such as
Stanley Kauffman’s 1961 piece for Time “Homosexual Drama and Its
Disguises,” feminist Betty Freidan’s homophobic comments about “man-hating
lesbians” in her The Feminine Mystique, the publication in 1964 in the Life
magazine essay on the rising dangers of homosexual culture (which I have cited
several times in these pages and in volumes of My Year since it had a
major impact on my own life at the
time**), and the 1966 disastrous premiere of Barber’s Anthony and Cleopatra
at the Metropolitan Opera for which the gay figures involved—Barber, Thomas
Schippers, Franco Zeffirelli, and Alvin Ailey—were accused of various
homosexual excesses, Sherry convinces, despite obvious flaws in his work, that
there was a growing sense of a gay conspiracy that the general public felt had
to be curtailed.
Sherry might also have cited the
difficulties that Markopoulos suddenly found himself encountering during those
very same years. From the beginning several critics thought that even the
rather tame images that the director presented in his films of eroticized males
and females were far too profusive and suggestive. He was highly criticized for
showing in his Du sang de la volupte et de la morte what consisted of
“closeups, in color and often protracted, of such things as a male nipple, a
painted and coiffured male head, a buttock, and two-shorts of a facially inert
girl and boy.”
During the early 1960s the noted critic
Andrew Sarris observed: “Markopoulos...is a really nasty, unpleasant person,
who really plays hardball, really gets angry, vicious about things, because of
this homosexual thing.” And others had begun regularly attacking Markopoulos’
use of the nude male image. By the 1965 New York Film Festival, Markopoulos
stood up to a panel of critics who had off-handedly dismissed the “New American
Cinema” filmmakers, the director calling the panelists “soulless morons.” As the
director summarized what he saw as the American failure: "The average man
is destroying beauty. The average man no longer looks into another man's eyes.
Everyone is afraid . . . sometimes I think the only way to save the United
States is by going somewhere else—just as the ancient Greek philosophers fled
to Asia Minor and Italy."
And by 1967 he and his
lover Beavers did precisely that, emigrating to Greece for good, cutting off
all distribution of his films in the US, and even demanding that Sitney remove
the chapter on Markopoulos from any further editions of his book.
In Greece, Markopoulos continued to make
films without any international distribution, working primarily on his grand
twenty-two eighty-hour cycle work which incorporated most of the films that
embraced ancient myth, Eniaios. He refused to show that work and others
outside of his version of Richard Wagner’s Bayreuth, Temenos near his birth-site
of Lysserea, Greece.
This explains why yesterday I found
myself watching the atrocious version of one of his most important films, Twice
a Man. very much representative of his theoretical positions outlined in
the same year, 1963, in his Towards a New Narrative Film Form:
I propose a new
narrative through the fusion of the class montage
system with a more
abstract system...[involving] the use of short
film phrases which evoke
thought-images.
In short, the barrage of quickly shifting repeated, suspended, and interrupted images of Twice a Man,
juxtaposed against the occasional fragments of recognizable words, the babble
of linguistic talk, and the various classical and jazz-infused musical passages
all separated by moments of silence, stillness, and even blackness to help the
viewer suddenly regain his composure, ultimately permitting the observer to
link, recombine, layer, and even dissociate the images to create a narrative
that can never be quite the same for any two viewers. Along with the rich
density of the colors, which Markopoulos describes as being related to Eros,
and the personal emotional associations one has with music this director’s work
allows us a narrative that combines present, past, and future with every myth
written or imagined about family, love, and belief and the transitions between
them makes for a new cinema that wasn’t easily assimilated in the US, or Greece
for that matter.
Based very loosely on the myth of
Hippolytus, Twice a Man places his hero in contemporary Manhattan and
Staten Island, retelling the original in fragments that also include another
figure, the young man’s physician, in Markopoulos’ telling, his lover who works
to save him.
In Euripides’ retelling of the myth the
handsome young Hippolytus was the son of the Athenian King Theseus and his
first wife, Hippolyte. The King’s second wife, Phaedra fell in love with her
stepson, revealing her love to him. When he heard of her love the boy reacted
with such a revulsion that Phaedra killed herself, leaving a note that
Hippolytus had attempted to rape her. Upon discovering the note Theseus,
despite his son’s protestations of innocence, banished him and called down upon
him one of the three curses the sea god Poseidon had promised. Poseidon called
upon a sea monster to so frighten the horses carrying Hippolytus’s chariot so
that he could no longer control them, dragging him down to a watery death.
In Markopoulos’ version we see the son
Paul (Paul Kilb) traveling from and returning to his boyhood home via the
Staten Island Ferry. Even before he returns home we see the boy as troubled,
walking out into the rain and peering down from a height to a crowd of
heterosexual dancers below, unable to take part in their activities and
possibly, given his positioning of himself at the very precipice, contemplating
suicide. A man, his physician friend (Albert Torgesen), however, soon walks
over to him and places his hand reassuringly on his shoulder, keeping it there
for a long while until Paul has summoned up his strength evidently to return to
his Staten Island home.
Once he returns to the house, images
past, present, and future converge upon him in the form of the staircase entry
and its chandelier, his pet cat, pieces of furniture and, most notably, his
mother (Olympia Dukakis, in her first film role) and an older/future version of
her (Violet Roditi). As critic Fred Camper reveals in his illustrative Chicago
Reader review, her calls to her son, “Paul” and her repeatedly unfinished
sentence “Why do you keep seeing....?” which in Markopoulos’ original script, evidently
used synchronized dialogue, was to have been “Why do you keep seeing the
physician?”—indicates, even if we don’t hear that entire sentence, that the
physician is his lover, and that his mother is not at happy with the other
man’s presence in their home.
As critic Kirk Winslow observed in 1998
the tale also represents what I argue is a kind of “A” version of a coming-out
story, in which the young man obviously must cut away the ties he still has to
his possessive mother in order consummate his relationship with the doctor. But
fortunately, Markopoulos’s complex images create other narratives take us in
other directions.
For example, just as there are two mothers
here, the physician can easily be recognized to be another version of Paul
himself, an older, more mature self within the younger being that helps him to
escape his mother’s possessive desires.
At the same time we become engaged with
Paul himself, not only with the beauty of his face but through the director’s
sensuous use of color, drawing us to the fleshy bronzed tones of his body reiterated
in his mother’s present and future.
Markopoulos’ obsession with certain
aspects of the body, moreover—hands, nose, the face in profile, hips, and feet—suggest
the various actions we associate with them. As in the films of Robert Bresson
(another gay filmmaker whose major works appeared in this very same period),
the hands, for instance—one of the post important images in Bresson’s oeuvre
(think of Pickpocket, Au Husard Balthazar, and Mouchette)—can
be used as verbal accessories, as tools to beckon or pull the lover toward one,
as expressions of comfort and support, or as accessories to grab and hold onto
anyone who might to escape. The nose is obviously central to breathing, but
also inhales the smells of bodily fear, love, and even hate. The naked foot may
signify the resting or sleeping lover but is also necessary for his
escape.
Despite his isolation from the dancers
earlier in the work, at one moment in the film we see the handsomely besuited
Paul dancing in a manner that calls up, at least for me, frames from the works
of Truffaut and Goddard. In fact, other than his rich color palette,
Markopoulos often seems to me to be the only US director who approximates the
same films of that period of the French and Italians. And this film, overall,
is closely related to Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad of two years earlier, particularly if you
think of the two Phaedra’s as variations of a woman the hero has known before
but may or may not want to forget or encounter again in the future yet,
nonetheless, will probably be doomed to meet as in the loop tape that the
director uses to call up several of his images before his eyes. Like Resnais’
film, Twice a Man is very much about repetition.
It is up to us to interpret, finally,
whether or not Paul succeeds in releasing himself from his stepmother’s
clutches. At one point he is seen in bed with his mother and, at another time,
with both his mother of his youth and future. Nearer the end of the film Paul
seems to be undressing to tease his physician friend. At one point it appears
that he has been destroyed by the sea, represented by the portrait of a sailor
that hangs in the hallway; but yet he also is enveloped in an inferno that
lifts his body into the cosmos, restoring the young man to life and, hence,
becoming “twice a man” just as are he and his savior/lover.
Finally, we recognize this home as a
kind of haunted house. And along with Paul’s calling upon the help of his
physician in order to resolve the difficulties he is having with a “double”
cannot but help remind us of another myth, this one an American tale cooked up
in the mind of one of our greatest mythmakers, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of
the House of Usher. The end of the film, in fact, seems to represent the
entire house crashing into the rain-sodden streets, all of the film’s
provocative images reduced to the sound of the film’s creaking sprockets. And
so we are returned to where we have begun, sound without sight.
*One generally described
such partially closeted experiences as living in a condition that was an “open
secret.” People in certain communities were well aware of what the general
public wasn’t. It is also important to
note that some of these figures such as Cheever remained deeply closeted and
others, Baldwin and both Paul and Jane Bowles chose expatriation over the
limitations put upon them by US culture.
**See my essay in this
volume on Pat Rocco’s Sign of Protest (1970).
Los Angeles, May 3, 2021
Reprinted from World
Cinema Review (May 2021).
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