Seven Films to be Preserved Through Avant-Garde Masters Grants
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Gregory Markopoulos’ Twice a Man (1963)
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Owen Land’s “structuralist” subversions, a Ken Jacobs reckoning with silent narrative, a mythic reverie from Gregory Markopoulos, an early work from Fred Camper, and a poetic nature study from montage maestro Slavko Vorkapich will all be saved through the 2015 Avant-Garde Masters Grants awarded by The Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation. All told, seven films will be preserved and made available through the 2015 grants.
Gregory Markopoulos’ Twice a Man, starring Olympia Dukakis and Paul Klib, will be saved through a grant to Temenos, an archive dedicated to the work of Markopoulos, which will partner with the Austrian Film Museum to complete preservation of this landmark film. Often cited as Markopoulos’ masterpiece, this modern take on the Hippolytus myth was a leap forward in the creation of what he called "a new narrative form through the fusion of the classic montage technique with a more abstract system."
“One of the touchstones of independent filmmaking, Gregory Markopoulos’ Twice a Man is a fragmented re-imagining of Greek myth transposed to 1960s New York,” said Mark Webber, editor of Film as Film: The Collected Writings of Gregory J. Markopoulos (Visible Press, 2014). “This restoration of Twice a Man through the Avant-Garde Masters Grant program will ensure that the film will be available to be appreciated for generations to come.”
The other titles green-lighted for preservation are The Doctor’s Dream (1978) by Ken Jacobs (SUNY Binghamton); Film in Which There Appear Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering, Dirt Particles, Etc. (1966), Institutional Quality (1967), and A Film of Their 1973 Spring Tour Commissioned by Christian World Liberation Front of Berkeley, CA (1974) by Owen Land (Anthology Film Archives); Welcome to Come (1968) by Fred Camper (Northwest Chicago Film Society); and Moods of the Sea (1942) by Slavko Vorkapich (UCLA Film & Television Archive).
Now in its thirteenth year, Avant-Garde Masters is the pioneering program created by The Film Foundation and the NFPF that saves films significant to the development of the avant-garde in America. Funding was provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation. The grants have preserved works by 61 artists, including Kenneth Anger, Shirley Clarke, Bruce Conner, Joseph Cornell, Oskar Fischinger, Hollis Frampton, Ernie Gehr, George and Mike Kuchar, and Carolee Schneemann.