portrait of a film director
by Douglas Messerli
Gregory J. Markopoulos (director) Ming Green / 1966
There is nothing specifically “gay” about the great queer director
Gregory J. Markopoulos’ 7-minute film Ming Green, and yet as a visually
stunning tour of his Greenwich Village apartment with the knowledge that he
would eventually have to leave it, it is perhaps one of his most personal
movies. And anyone who is interested in his innovative queer works will want to
watch this beautiful film over several times both for insights about his
cinematographic art and for further information about the director himself.
In a lecture delivered at Kent
State University in June of 1968, Markopoulos himself has nicely explained both
the title and the occasion of his filming:
“…The reason the film is called Ming Green is because it’s about a very
beautiful apartment, a very simple apartment, that I had in New York for about
six or seven years, where most of these films were edited. The apartment was
painted Ming green, which is sort of a Chinese-y color, and that’s why the film
is called Ming Green. Stan Brakhage gave me the idea. He said mine was the only
apartment in New York City that he could stand to come and visit, because it
was very, very quiet. The apartment itself is the subject of the film, which
took about two days to do. And the important thing to understand about it is
that it wasn’t preplanned in any way. Not even notes. It was simply that I
wanted to make a document of this particular apartment, because I was giving it
up to go and live in Europe.”
He continues, explaining how
it was filmed:
“The important thing about this film is that all the editing was done in
the camera itself. As you already probably know, I have a system in which I
edit using single frames and it gets very, very complicated, as in Twice a
Man, or Himself As Herself. In Ming Green all these single frames,
all these superimpositions were done in the camera itself. This was not only
important because it meant that the filmmaker had to work in a very
concentrated fashion to get whatever it was that he wanted onto film. It also
meant, economically, that this film, which otherwise might have cost about
$200, cost fifty dollars, because once all the footage was sent to the lab, you
had a completed film. All you had to do was to add the soundtrack.
I think this is a wonderful
way of making films and I think that someday I will make a whole feature-length
film, a film over sixty minutes, using this particular method. It’s a very
personal film, as you’ll see, and because you won’t have an opportunity to see
it a second time or even a third time, which would be the proper way of seeing
a film, I should tell you that there are some very personal things in it—some
photographs of my family, for instance. The film oddly enough ends with a
photograph of my mother, who after I made it died of cancer. It was an uncanny
thing, because I had no prior idea about using the photograph, and at the end
the image sort of blurs.”
The film actually begins just
outside of the apartment with a picture of the neighboring tree underneath of
which are lawn chairs that are overlapped and superimposed upon each other,
continuing for while even when we enter into the apartment itself. Interfused
with these images is a vague, almost haunting-like view of the now almost reverse
negative view of the outside from within set against the bright orange curtains
and, soon after, the red-lacquered chair, bright oppositional colors that set
off the calm darkness of the room even more notably that any light from the
garden below. The color is minimal but stunningly bright, like the extremely
red rose that appears throughout many of the later sequences.
Even more notably are what I
would describe as the pulses of this film, a pause in image to a momentary darkened
screen on occasion before returning to the room itself, as if the apartment
were itself were a being, breathing in and out, closing and opening its eyes.
Soon a record seems to fall
into place playing “Träumen” (“Dreams”) from Richard Wagner's Five Songs for
Mathilde Wesendonck as sung by Kirsten Flagstad. It is almost as if the
music now invites us on the tour of the room. Kristin Jones, writing in Millennium
Film Journal in 1998, fully catalogues many of the images of personal
significance we now experience:
“One is a photographic nude hanging between the windows which are now
shown with the curtains drawn—by Edmund Teske, an acquaintance of the
filmmaker. A large, pink, artificial rose seen standing by a fireplace in
another composition was a gift from three students who had attended a lecture
by Markopoulos at their college. Three record albums are also seen propped up
on a table like works of art. Ming Green is dedicated to Stan Brakhage…and
the luminous vertical streak to the right of the frame in another shot of the
green interior is a strip from Brakhage’s Mothlight.”
To me this arrangement of
objects looks very much like a small shrine that one might find in the home of
an Asian dedicated to the memory of a dead one; in this case the objects standing
as emblems of significant events in the past.
Moreover, as the music grows
increasingly intense the focus of the film more and more becomes the artificial
rose Jones describes as being pink, but alternates as bright red, growing
larger, with other objects being superimposed and seemingly projecting their
forces upon it.
The director briefly flashes
us with a view of his library shelf, containing a volume, obviously hand-bound,
of Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, Thomas Mann, and Nikos Kazantzakis.
Jones nicely provides a tour
of the rest of the images, some of them, such as the photographs, difficult for
the inexperienced eye to even glimpse let alone to recognize the significance
of:
“[The bookshelf episode is]
followed by a slowly blinking close-up of a drum-shaped, scarlet-and-gold
Christmas ornament hanging above. This trinket echoes a drumming wind-up toy in
Christmas U.S.A. (1949) one of Markopoulos' early black-and-white
psychodramas; here, however, it is the image itself that beats, in a beautiful
visual pun that underlines the musicality of Markopoulos' editing technique. An
array of framed photographs on the walls of the apartment glimpsed in the
remaining minutes of the film includes an image of Paul Kilb, the protagonist
of Twice a Man; a snapshot of Markopoulos as a child held by his father;
and a portrait of Clara Hoover, who represented Io in The Illiac Passion
(1964-67), and who was also a valuable patron, providing Markopoulos with the
funds to complete Twice a Man.”
A slightly disheveled but
nonetheless folded white shirt hovering upon the drum midair before the
photographs. The director finally returns us to the orange drapes against which
he imposes a houndstooth pattern of a nearby blanket, before panning to the
image of his mother Maria who had died of cancer in January 1966, shortly
before this film was made.
And so we come to a close of a
truly personal tour of the artist’s apartment, a room which we now feel, very
much as Brakhage has proclaimed, is one we might feel comfortable in visiting.
Here, as in Bliss (1966) and Gammelion (1968), Markopoulos,
through color and composition, makes rooms themselves seem to come alive,
revealing the breathing, thinking, dreaming, sexual being who lived within.
Los Angeles, November 14, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).
