Under the Arcadian sky: Gregory Markopoulos’s 80-hour epic Eniaios concludes at the Temenos

Under generous mid-June skies, the seventh edition of Gregory Markopoulos’s Eniaios screenings, presenting the last four cycles of his nearly 80-hour cinematic epic, unfolded to its conclusion at the Temenos, the Arcadian site dedicated to its presentation. As dusk settled over the landscape, the ritual resumed: the preparation of the 16mm projector, the gathering of over 160 spectators, and the unveiling of Markopoulos’s images. Cast upon the large screen and amid the landscape, the images at times seemed less projected than suspended in the night sky itself.

Gregory J. Markopoulos (1928 to 1992) was a pioneering Greek-American filmmaker whose work united literary and mythological themes with an innovative cinematic language. After early films such as Psyche (1948), informed by classical philosophy and mythology, his practice shifted dramatically in the 1960s. Having devoted several years to The Illiac Passion (1967), inspired by the myth of Prometheus, he moved away from narrative towards studies of people, landscape and architecture. Key works include Galaxie (1966), a series of 33 portraits featuring figures such as W.H. Auden and Susan Sontag, and Himself as Herself (1967), influenced by Balzac’s Séraphîta. These films are distinguished by their layered, richly colourful imagery, created through multiple exposures and experimental editing in his Bolex camera.

At the peak of his career and disillusioned with the reception of avant-garde cinema in the United States, he left for Europe in 1967 with his partner, filmmaker Robert Beavers. He conceived the Temenos, a unique archive for the preservation, presentation and study of his work, championing filmmaking freedom and pure cinema as expressions of the filmmaker’s spirit. From 1974 onwards, Markopoulos envisioned the Temenos near Lyssarea, the village of his ancestors in Gortynia in the north-western Arcadia region of the Peloponnese, as a screening site, where spectators would experience a sense of unrestricted openness.

For Markopoulos and Beavers, cinema was a means of engaging with fundamental human experience and reflection. This philosophy informed both the Temenos and Markopoulos’s final project, Eniaios (1947 to 1991), an 80-hour re-editing of his life’s work, which he completed shortly before his death and never saw projected.

In the years following Markopoulos’s death, most of the film’s splices came apart. In 2000, Beavers began restoring the vast 22-part film, and cycles I and II premiered at the Temenos in 2004 to an international audience that travelled to Greece for the screenings – making the five-hour journey from Athens to Gortynia. Further screenings followed in 2008, 2012, 2016, 2022 and 2024 as additional cycles were restored by Beavers and the Temenos volunteers, who inspected them several times to ensure that not a single frame was lost. This process culminated in June 2026 with the completion of the restoration and the premiere of the film’s final four cycles, XIX–XXII.

Markopoulos’s distinctive technique, in which images are interrupted by lengths of black and clear leader, creates a singular rhythm of seeing. The final presentation of Eniaios proceeded over four evenings beneath the Arcadian sky, bringing together filmmakers, critics, scholars and long-time followers of his work. Each evening, we walked for half an hour from Lyssarea to the valley, returning after midnight when the screening had ended and dispersing to the nearby villages where we were staying. Wildflowers, pine-scented air, birdsong and the moonlit landscape formed an inseparable part of the experience, realising the openness and freedom that Markopoulos envisioned for the Temenos more than 50 years ago. 

Cycle XIX opened with a portrait of Spanish artist Eduardo Arroyo, dressed in a tailored suit with a red layer beneath. The experience showed Markopoulos’s framing of elegantly dressed figures, cut to a rhythm faster than a blink. By the end of the first reel, it’s already very dark in the valley. Did Markopoulos imagine the disappearance of light as the passage of his subjects who have since died? As successive reels unfolded, glimpses of classical ruins and sunlit corners of gardens and abandoned buildings appeared and vanished in quick succession, while many of us found our gaze drifting between the screen and the crescent moon overhead.

Other portraits followed in cycles XX and XXI, among them the documentary filmmaker Basil Wright and the historian Carl J. Burckhardt, and, in the concluding cycle XXII, the poet Eugenio Montale. The screenings were expertly presented by Kate MacKay, Associate Film Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, who has overseen all Eniaios screenings at the Temenos and has been the projectionist since 2008, following German experimental filmmaker Karl Kels, who projected the first cycles in 2004.

On the fourth night, the power of the final cycle seemed to unfold somewhere between the enchantment of the night air and the simple fact of being there. Four sections from The Illiac Passion, in which people embody mythological figures, and three from Eros, O Basileus (1967), where a young Beavers appears as King Eros, were interwoven deep into the night. The resulting constellation of images drew one towards beauty, desire, passion and love. It was impossible not to think, too, of Beavers’s decades-long commitment to the Temenos project, which made the restoration of Eniaios and its premiere beneath the Arcadian sky possible.