Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Gregory Markopoulos hypno films



I can't think of anything kind to say about avant garde film maker Gregory Markopoulos. He exploits the technique high speed flash cueing to induce trance states of nebulous receptivity to embed "thought images" into the mind of his audience.

His temple environment, Temenos, the only sanctioned and authorized way to experience his films, reveal the grandiose nature of this man's delusions. Markopoulos glamorizes ancient tyranny and uses covert persuasive technology: culminating in processing the viewers of what I call his cultish "training films".

Gregory Markopoulos Bio

In the last ten years of his life, Markopoulos toiled over Eniaios, another, and the ultimate, reworking of his entire earlier film output. It was fully edited and notated, but left unprinted, at the time of his death.

A completely silent eighty-hour long, epic re-configuration of his previous works, it contains 100 individual titles arranged in 22 cycles.

Edited in the manner of the later, black-leader, films, it is to be seen ideally over several weeks, in a yearly summer-fetival held at the Temenos, a special open-air cinema theatre dedicated to Markopoulos's works and those of Robert Beavers.



200 people attend his 8 hour films of blinking images and hidden optical messages of one-frame duration, lasting 1/24 of a second.

Putting a person in a room where they focus on on point of light, and flashing images so brief that the viewer cannot consciously perceive or argue with them resistantly is a classic brainwashing methodology, known as high speed flash cueing.

Eniaios, whose title indicates both the “singularity” and the “uniqueness” of the film, reedits many of Markopoulos’s early films around his conception of the single frame as the basic filmic unit. While many of the original films included a sound track, the whir of the projector and the occasional insect provided the only accompaniment here. Reduced to lengths of a few seconds or even a single frame, cinematic fragments extracted from complete films—some of which, never having been printed, were literally respliced, their previous incarnations discarded—present the filmmaker’s oeuvre as a ruin or as an incomplete archive.

- Silent Nights
Art Forum


Still, we have much to learn from Markopoulos regarding his use of erasure, black and white leader tape rhythms, and subtle visual effects. It's the after-image subliminals that are troubling in a fascist thought-control manner.

Gregory Markopoulos on Wikipedia

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