Museum of the Moving Image Presents ENIAIOS, 2/19

Museum of the Moving Image invites you to a press screening of one of the year's most exciting avant-garde film events. Visionary filmmaker and American expatriate Gregory Markopoulos (1928-1992) devoted his last twenty years to Eniaios, an eighty-hour meditation on the essence of cinema, embodied in an intricate fusion of Greek myth, portraiture, and landscape. The film was designed to be shown only in its entirety during special screenings of its twenty-two cycles, or "orders," in a carefully chosen site outside the Peloponnesian village of Lyssaria. At the current pace of restoration and preservation, with successive screenings of individual cycles every few years, the entire film will not be seen until 2028.

Museum of the Moving Image will screen Eniaios: Cycle 5 on Saturday, February 19, 2011, at 3:00 p.m. Prior to the screening will be an hour-long panel discussion, at 1:00 p.m., with Robert Beavers, who was Gregory Markopoulos's companion for nearly thirty years and who directs the Temenos Association, devoted to the preservation and presentation of Markopoulos's work. A panel of noted scholars, including Rebekah Rutkoff, Dr. Jeffrey Stout, and Richard Suchenski, will discuss Markopoulos's work. This 16mm projection copy of Eniaios: Cycle 5 was made possible by a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation, with funding from The Film Foundation. The screening is part of the series Avant-Garde Masters (January 15-February 19, 2011), with restored prints of significant avant-garde films. For more about the series, go to http://www.movingimage.us/films/2011/01/15/detail/avant-garde-masters/