- Courtesy the Temenos Archive and the Austrian Film Museum, Vienna.
Tonight at 6 PM the Gene Siskel Film Center’s experimental film series, “Conversations at the Edge,” will present a rare screening of Eniaios II, the second installment in a 22-film cycle by the Greek-American filmmaker Gregory J. Markopoulos (1928-1992). Once an instructor at the School of the Art Institute, Markopoulos established himself as a key figure in the New American Cinema movement but then left the U.S. in 1967 and eventually withdrew his work from circulation, for the most part allowing it to be screened only on a hillside theater in Lyssaraia, the Greek village where his father had lived before emigrating to Toledo, Ohio. “Alluding to ancient Greek religious traditions, he called the place he had selected for his theater a temenos,” wrote the critic P. Adams Sitney in a 2004 review for Artforum, “a sacred precinct, literally a place ‘cut off’ and dedicated to a divinity, where usually an altar, a temple, and a cult image would be erected.”