Twice a Man (film)

Twice a Man
Publicity still from a 1963 advertisement
Directed byGregory Markopoulos
Produced byGregory Markopoulos
CinematographyGregory Markopoulos
Edited byGregory Markopoulos
Distributed byThe Film-Makers' Cooperative
Release date
  • June 15, 1963 (1963-06-15)
Running time
49 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish

Twice a Man is a 1963 American avant-garde film directed by Gregory Markopoulos.

Synopsis

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The film opens with a black screen and the sound of rain. Paul stands at the edge of a roof, considering suicide, until the artist-physician places his hand on Paul's shoulder. Paul takes the ferry across the New York Harbor and visits his mother.[1]

At his mother's house, memories and dreams of Paul, the artist-physician, and Paul's mother as a young and old woman are shown. In the film's ending, Paul collapses while dancing, and the artist-physician goes to kiss him, their faces merging in superimposition. Once the artist-physician moves away, the image of Paul cracks as if a broken mirror, and a white screen remains.[2]

Cast

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  • Paul Kilb as Paul
  • Albert Torgesen as the artist-physician
  • Olympia Dukakis as the young mother
  • Violet Roditi as the elder mother[3]

Production

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Markopoulos's casting of Olympia Dukakis marked her first screen role.[3] He shot the film in New York in March 1963, using a camera from Charles Levine.[4][5] Markopoulos originally planned to include sync sound in Twice a Man but revised this several times while making the film. He prepared a script where dialogue was related to the images but not synchronized. He decided to instead use voice-over for a few of the characters before paring this down to voice-over for the mother only. His revised script reduced the dialogue to words and phrases that could be arranged as needed in the soundtrack.[6][7] Markopoulos edited the scenes in order, with a highly intricate style in which shots may be broken up by sudden, rapid bursts of images.[8][9]

Themes

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Twice a Man is a modern retelling of the Greek myth of Hippolytus.[10] Paul's ferry ride is symbolic of crossing the River Styx. Events at the house make reference to the offering of a lock of hair, the incestuous relation with Phaedra, and the heavenly rebirth.[11] Critic P. Adams Sitney characterizes Twice a Man as a mythopoeic film, connecting it to other contemporary works in American experimental cinema—Dog Star Man, Scorpio Rising, and Heaven and Earth Magic—with a similar interest in myth-making.[12]

Release

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A 1965 advertisement for Du sang de la volupte et de la mort and Twice a Man

A silent version of Twice a Man screened at the Gramercy Arts Theatre on June 15, 1963, as part of a fundraiser organized by the Film-Makers' Cooperative to finish the film.[4] Jonas Mekas documented the premiere in several shots of his film Lost, Lost, Lost.[13] Twice a Man was first shown with its completed soundtrack on October 4, 1963.[4]

Markopoulos submitted the film to the third Knokke-Le-Zoute Experimental Film Festival [fr] in Belgium, where it won a $2,000 prize.[14] Because of an incident at the festival where Flaming Creatures could not be screened, Mekas floated the idea of prize recipients refusing their awards; however, Markopoulos decided to accept it.[15]

In 1967, Markopoulos made a double projection of the film called Twice a Man Twice, in which one copy of the original film is played forward and the other in reverse.[16] He included segments from Twice a Man in cycles 4, 8, 15, and 19 of his final project Eniaios.[17] A re-edited version of Twice a Man was screened at the 1997 New York Film Festival.[18]

Reception

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Jonas Mekas praised the film in his column for The Village Voice, calling it "the most important and most beautiful film to open in New York this year".[19] Critic Fred Camper credited it as "the film that got me interested in cinema."[3]

Ron Rice's The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man includes a parody of Twice a Man. His rough cut of the film, which was unfinished when he died in 1963, ends on the ferry where Twice a Man begins.[20] Director Werner Schroeter cited the film's "curiously slow, long-drawn-out sequences and frankly gay images of men" as an influence on his 1969 film Eika Katappa  [fr].[21] The film is now part of Anthology Film Archives' Essential Cinema Repertory collection.[22]

References

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  1. ^ Sitney 2002, pp. 131–133.
  2. ^ Sitney 2002, pp. 132–134.
  3. ^ a b c Camper, Fred (October 2, 2003). "Wrinkles in Time". Chicago Reader. Retrieved July 1, 2024.
  4. ^ a b c O'Donoghue, Darragh (November 2023). "Twice a Man". Senses of Cinema. Retrieved July 1, 2024.
  5. ^ Brown, Robert (1964). "Interview with Gregory Markopoulos". Film Culture. Vol. 32. p. 8.
  6. ^ Sitney 2002, pp. 134–135.
  7. ^ Curtis 1971, pp. 85–86.
  8. ^ Sitney 2002, p. 135.
  9. ^ Renan 1967, p. 165.
  10. ^ Renan 1967, p. 166.
  11. ^ Sitney 2002, pp. 132–133.
  12. ^ Sitney 2002, p. 205.
  13. ^ Ruoff, Jeffrey K. (1991). "Home Movies of the Avant-Garde: Jonas Mekas and the New York Art World". Cinema Journal. 30 (3): 23. doi:10.2307/1224927. JSTOR 1224927.
  14. ^ Sitney, P. Adams (October 1968). "Report on the Fourth International Experimental Film Exposition at Knokke-le-Zoute". Film Culture. Vol. 46. p. 7.
  15. ^ Markopoulos, Gregory (1972). "The Adamantine Bridge (On 'Illiac Passion')". Film Culture. Vol. 53–55. p. 86.
  16. ^ Suchenski 2016, p. 78.
  17. ^ Suchenski 2016, p. 92.
  18. ^ Sitney 2014, p. 219.
  19. ^ Mekas, Jonas (October 3, 1963). "More on Markopoulos and Twice a Man". The Village Voice.
  20. ^ Sitney 2002, p. 302.
  21. ^ Schroeter & Lenssen 2017, p. 38.
  22. ^ "Essential Cinema". Anthology Film Archives. Retrieved September 22, 2024.

Bibliography

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