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February 7, 2015 La Casa Encendida, Audiovisual Room
Du sang, de la volupté et de la mort
Psyche. 16mm film, 1947, colour, sound, 24 min.
Lysis. 16mm film, 1948, colour, sound, 25 min.
Charmides. 16mm film, 1948, colour, sound, 11 min.
Presentation by Mark Webber, editor of the book Film as Film: The Collected Writings of Gregory J. Markopoulos (The Visible Press, 2014) and independent programmer.
Psyche, Lysis and Charmides make up the trilogy Du sang, de la volupté et de la mort, branded “degenerate” by critics at the time as it openly explored the awakening of homosexual desire in the repressive moral climate of the 1950s. In his first 16mm film, Markopoulos took inspiration from the unfinished novel Psyche, by Pierre Louÿs, which starts and finishes with a door opening and closing ( he goes in a boy and comes out a man ). An inaudible encounter and an illegible letter submerge the viewer in unconscious associations: changing colours on the screen reveal the true character, with psychosexual states (narcissism and homosexuality), erotic symbols and cine-trance (somnambulism, dreams, hypnosis). Assembled with only a magnifying glass, tape and a razorblade, the spine of these films supports a love for places (Hollywood Hills) and people (the actors were chosen because of their appearance and form of expression). Lysis and Charmides, meanwhile, were inspired by Plato’s dialogues on friendship and temperance; filmed in Ohio, both affirm the possibilities of myth in modernity and celebrate a new montage: Lysis is filmed entirely in sequences, practically without discards, while Charmides represents the consistency of film as film.
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February 8, 2015 La Casa Encendida, Audiovisual Room
Gammelion
Bliss. 16mm film, 1967, colour, sound, 6 min.
Gammelion. 16mm film, 1968, colour, sound, 54 min.
In June of 1967, Markopoulos visited the Byzantine chapel San Juan Bautista on the island of Hidra. Three months later, he returned for the second time to the Castello di Roccasinibalda, which he had become obsessed with in a previous trip to Italy. Bliss and Gammelion stem from two overwhelming places with various limitations: time (1 or 2 days of filming), materials (only two reels in each film) and light (only natural light). In Bliss he selects the first composition (the door of the church) on which he films the subsequent overlaps, cutting and assembling as though the camera were a chisel. In Gammelion, as with the frescoes or the dome in Bliss, he passes through rooms, hallways, walls, and gardens. Markopoulos didn’t film his first screenplay, which was inspired by the surrealist novel Au château d’Argol, since the author, Julien Gracq, refused to give authorisation, considering the project too esoteric. Filming the whole castle in segments of less than 30cms, on the second day he explores some of the same places, taking new shots with the morning light. At the time of assembling the film, he chose to turn these five minutes of footage into a one-hour film, using systematic interstices in opaque white (fade out) and black (fade in), accompanied by a soundtrack with music by Roussel and the verses of Rilke.
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February 9, 2015 Museo Reina Sofía. Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Portraits
Through a Lens Brightly: Mark Turbyfill. 16mm film, 1967, colour, sound, 14 min.
Political Portraits. 16mm film, 1969, colour, 12 min (fragment).
The Olympian. 16mm film, 1969, colour, silent, 23 min.
Gilbert and George. 16mm film, 1975, colour, silent, 12 min.
Presentation by Arnau Vilaró, historian, film critic and member of the editorial board of the publication Lumière.
Between two significant portrait films, Galaxie and Political Portraits, Markopoulos filmed the painter and poet Mark Turbyfill over the course of six hours. Through improvisation a definitive form was found in the process itself and in the camera montage. As in Gilbert & George, these portraits do not strive to identify so much as reveal every piece of film as a vessel of continuous time. In Political Portraits, he travelled around Europe to film Chirico and Nureyev: these portraits denote the humanist and complex reverse of Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests. Although the relaxed feel and the rhythm of New York differ in Galaxie, the running time of the portrait still corresponds in terms of rolls of film. At the beginning of the original film Markopoulos read a fragment from Valéry’s L'Homme et la nuit, while, subsequently, in The Olympian he mounted a portrait of Alberto Moravia in his Rome balcony with fades to black.
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February 10, 2015 Museo Reina Sofía. Sabatini Building, Auditorium
The Illiac Passion
The Illiac Passion. 16mm film, 1964–67, colour, sound, 91 min.
Over the course of his life, Markopoulos returned to Greek mythology time and again. This film, one of his most acclaimed, constitutes a visionary reinterpretation of Prometheus Bound, by Aeschylus, interpreted by new mythical subjects from the North American underground in the 1960s. Narcissus, Icarus, Daedalus, Apollo, Venus and Adonis were erotic starting points to wander through the emotion of certain actors – Jack Smith, Taylor Mead, Gerard Malanga, Gregory Battcock, Paul Swan or even Andy Warhol, who formed a decentralised framework of scenes around Central Park. Bound, freed in different versions, transformed into molecules, these bodies, symbols of desire or opposing binomial, Markopoulos wrote, rhyming with the musicality of chosen lenses or the paused reading of the film-maker in the translation of myth carried out by Henry David Thoreau. The impossibility of making a copy of the first three-hour version is one of the renunciations that resulted in Markopoulos leaving for Europe.
Film as Film: the films of Gregory J. Markopoulos
Held on 07, 08, 09, 10 Feb 2015
This film series presents a selection of work by Gregory J. Markopoulos (1928–1992), who made some of the most subjective and allegorical film poetics in post-war experimental cinema. With four sessions screened in both La Casa Encendida and the Museo Reina Sofía, this series is also the outcome of a collaboration between an extensive international network of arts centres and film institutes which, co-occurring with the publication of the director’s writings, endeavours to review a body of work that joins formal experimentation and individual mythology.
A contemporary of Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage and Maya Deren, Gregory J. Markopulos (1928–1992) was born in the USA to Greek emigrants, a sensibility and foreign condition that would underlie his constant trips to Europe from the 1950s onwards, bringing him into contact with Jean Cocteau and establishing a hermetic and narcissistic sense of cultural tradition. After Psyche (1947), his first 16mm film, Markopoulos built his own cinematic space, articulated by biographical narration and the translation and contemporary reinterpretation of mythological, literary and musical sources. This series introduces the keys to sensual and excessive poetics, in which homosexual identity, initiation rites and allegory circle around complex editing techniques and spontaneously superimposed images.
Disillusioned with the possibilities of the post-war Avant-garde and sceptical about the role of institutions, audience and circles of experimental cinema, Markopoulos set out for Europe for good in 1967, withdrawing his films from circulation and, in the process, turning his work into an elusive cult object. With the notion that the film-maker must be responsible for every aspect of their work, he conceived Temenos, a space of pilgrimage and monographic archive to present, restore and study his films, located in Arcadia, Greece, the place of his birth. The culmination of this project can be seen in Eniaios: twenty-two eighty-hour cycles reassembling his work and replacing sound with the mental rhythm brought about by the speed of brief images between black and white passages. Since 2004, this total artwork project has been screened every four years and represents a celebration of cinema. Markopoulos’ life is well documented and continues to resonate with the words he would quote from Mircea Eliade: The whole man is engaged when he listens to myths and legends; consciously or not, their message is always deciphered and absorbed in the end.
In collaboration with
the publications Lumière and The Visible Press, with special thanks to Robert Beavers and Temenos
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía and La Casa Encendida
Más actividades
Files of Tropical Revolutions
Sábado 20 y 27 de junio, 2026 - 19:00 H
The Reframing Banana Imagery series concludes with two works that condense the height and twilight of this period in history, epic sagas that cross borders and registers to embody experiences of armed struggle in the region. Cameras mix with firearms, borders between nations blur and patience reaches breaking point. This is where the tipping point lies, where the bloodshed weighs heavy and the murmurings of regional brotherhood are buried in the ground again.
Pan y dignidad (Carta abierta de Nicaragua) [Bread and Dignity (An Open Letter to Nicaragua)] recounts the historical records and process of national reconstruction in Nicaragua via the Sandinista popular uprising. Historias prohibidas de Pulgarcito (Forbidden Tales of Tom Thumb) places the camera at the heart of the El Salvador revolutionary struggle, interspersing testimonies of daily violence with the verses of the poet Roque Dalton.
Both works understand the armed revolution as an open file under construction. The insurgent brotherhood, although dissolved, still resounds in regional history.
Circling Over Exploited Bodies
Friday, 19 and 26 June 2026 - 7pm
When forms of violence are inflicted on society, film responds from urgency. Images become abstract, sounds fade and the register of dissidence comes from the gut. La zona intertidal (The Intertidal Zone) is an essayistic and poetic approach to the repression of teachers in El Salvador in the 1970s — a teacher studies the biodiversity of the El Salvador coast as a boy finds a body on the same beach. A propósito de la mujer (About Women) interweaves testimonies of misery and rage towards patriarchal structures with fictional scenes of a symbolic procession through a harsh desert.
Both films understand the body as a target of violence and a territory of insurrection, a space where the blood shed by militancy and the patriarchal yoke turn pain into denouncement and existence outside the status quo into an act of political dissidence.
Central American Designation of Origin
Thursday, 18 and 25 June 2026 - 7pm
Fertile lands, farmers’ hands, rural faces. This first programme in the series Reframing Banana Imagery understands the foundations of the Central American experience from exploitation, extractivism and displacement, and from the organisation and resistance that emerged as a reaction. The four films within extend from a lyrical documentary on farmers’ solidarity to the playful subversion of the institutional format of the United Fruit Company.
Bananeras (Banana Growers) is a combative portrait of the inhumane conditions of the American banana plantations located in Nicaragua through much of the twentieth century. Costa Rica Banana Republic is a perspicacious satire via an institutional documentary of banana production, spotlighting the extractive nature of this agro-exporting model in the 1970s. Organización Campesina (Farmers’ Organisation) frames rural resistance in Honduras from a direct depiction and lyrical documentary, while Dos veces mujer (Two Times a Woman) dissects the invisibility of the double-shift working day Central American women farmers endure: working in the countryside and working in the home. As a whole, the works here present the earth at once as a wounded body and a space of dignity.
Cinema, for the First Time
7 and 14 June 2026 – 12:00 pm
The final session in this Moon Projector season contemplates the feeling around the first experience of cinema — cinema as revelation, magic, fantasy and mystery from the first gaze, from the first contact with the medium, and imagery etched on the retina of childhood. The programme shows Émile Cohl’s landmark Fantasmagorie (1908), the first ever hand-drawn animation, and Ignacio Agüero’s Cien niños esperando un tren (One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train, 1988), a feature-length film on play and the origins of cinema.
Fantasmagorie (1908)by Émile Cohl (Paris, 1857– Villejuif, 1938) is the first expression in the history of animated drawing. Émile Cohl was an illustrator who belonged to the Parisian art group Arts incohérents (1882–1895), who was bestowed with an absurdist and pre-Surrealist talent. Whereas the Lumière brothers were able get audiences out of their seats as they witnessed a train moving towards them in 1895, Fantasmagorie is a supernatural experience, akin to an apparition yet also innocuous and entertaining — the inanimate comes to life out of nothing and figures seemingly move with little sense. From the outset, animation was related to caricature, fabulation and the comical, a sweet spot for the dreams of the youngest audience.
From the discovery of new imagery arising from the animated line to knowledge of the world through a screen, Cien niños esperando un tren (1988), by Chilean director Ignacio Agüero (Santiago, 1952), narrates a group of young people’s discovery of cinema in a workshop on the origins of the medium in a poverty-stricken town on the outskirts of Santiago de Chile. Play, fun and learning combine with a fascination with images, as viewing Émile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908) in the workshop becomes an act of freedom.
Elisa González and Leah Pattem. Soy Tribulete 7
13 JUN 2026
Framed inside this year’s Neighbourhood Picnic is the screening, in the Museo’s Cinema, of a film related to the life and protests of the Lavapiés neighbourhood, addressing issues of gentrification and the right to housing: Soy Tribulete 7 (I Am Tribulete 7, 2026), directed by Elisa González and Leah Pattem.
As the Spanish housing crisis takes hold in Lavapiés, this story begins in February 2024, when the residents of Calle Tribulete, 7, a block of apartments on a street in this Madrid barrio, receive a letter informing them that their building has been sold to a vulture fund. The news spreads quickly around the neighbourhood and, when it comes to the attention of González and Pattem, they grab their cameras and head straight for the building, where they encounter one hundred or so residents still in shock. The film Soy Tribulete 7 flows into the building and the daily lives of a community united, whose looming eviction occasions the fight of their lives. Ultimately, a path of resistance that will turn the community into a symbol of struggle for the right to housing.
Both film-makers worked closely with a group of tenants — Cris, Nani, Blanca, José, María Jesús and Antonia — to tell the story of how the building became the most creative stage of resistance ever witnessed in the area. The work presents the daily life of these residents in Madrid’s now-iconic “building fighting eviction”, depicting their collective struggle and the violent disruption to their lives. Through personal interviews, observational footage, archive material, music and a narration by eighty-year-old actress Ana Martín García, the film casts light on the human stories behind a community struggle.
The Neighbourhood Picnic is an annual gathering of festivities organised by Museo Situado, a network made up of associations, activists and residents from Lavapiés, a racially diverse, working-class neighbourhood where the Museo Reina Sofía is located.