Twice a Man (film)
| Twice a Man | |
|---|---|
_advertisement.jpg) Publicity still from a 1963 advertisement | |
| Directed by | Gregory Markopoulos |
| Produced by | Gregory Markopoulos |
| Cinematography | Gregory Markopoulos |
| Edited by | Gregory Markopoulos |
| Distributed by | The Film-Makers' Cooperative |
Release date |
|
Running time | 49 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Twice a Man is a 1963 American avant-garde film directed by Gregory Markopoulos.
Synopsis[edit]
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[edit]
- Paul Kilb as Paul
- Albert Torgesen as the artist-physician
- Olympia Dukakis as the young mother
- Violet Roditi as the elder mother[3]
Production[edit]
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[edit]
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[edit]
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 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]
Reception[edit]
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".[18] 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.[19] 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 .[20]
References[edit]
- ^ Sitney 2002, pp. 131–133.
- ^ Sitney 2002, pp. 132–134.
- ^ a b c Camper, Fred (October 2, 2003). "Wrinkles in Time". Chicago Reader. Retrieved July 1, 2024.
- ^ a b c O'Donoghue, Darragh (November 2023). "Twice a Man". Senses of Cinema. Retrieved July 1, 2024.
- ^ Brown, Robert (1964). "Interview with Gregory Markopoulos". Film Culture. Vol. 32. p. 8.
- ^ Sitney 2002, pp. 134–135.
- ^ Curtis 1971, pp. 85–86.
- ^ Sitney 2002, p. 135.
- ^ Renan 1967, p. 165.
- ^ Renan 1967, p. 166.
- ^ Sitney 2002, pp. 132–133.
- ^ Sitney 2002, p. 205.
- ^ Ruoff, Jeffrey K. (1991). "Home Movies of the Avant-Garde: Jonas Mekas and the New York Art World". Cinema Journal. 30 (3): 23. JSTOR 1224927.
- ^ Sitney, P. Adams (October 1968). "Report on the Fourth International Experimental Film Exposition at Knokke-le-Zoute". Film Culture. Vol. 46. p. 7.
- ^ Markopoulos, Gregory (1972). "The Adamantine Bridge (On 'Illiac Passion')". Film Culture. Vol. 53–55. p. 86.
- ^ Suchenski 2016, p. 78.
- ^ Suchenski 2016, p. 92.
- ^ Mekas, Jonas (October 3, 1963). "More on Markopoulos and Twice a Man". The Village Voice.
- ^ Sitney 2002, p. 302.
- ^ Schroeter & Lenssen 2017, p. 38.
Bibliography[edit]
- Curtis, David (1971). Experimental Cinema. Dell Publishing Co.
- Renan, Sheldon (1967). An Introduction to the American Underground Film. E. P. Dutton & Co.
- Schroeter, Werner; Lenssen, Claudia (2017). Days of Twilight, Nights of Frenzy. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-01911-6.
- Sitney, P. Adams (2002). Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943–2000. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-514886-2.
- Suchenski, Richard I. (2016). Projections of Memory: Romanticism, Modernism, and the Aesthetics of Film. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-027411-5.
External links[edit]
- Twice a Man at IMDb
- Twice a Man at the Temenos
