Gregory Markopoulos 1928-1992
Twice a Man (1963)
Directed by Gregory Markopoulos
US 1963, 16mm, color, 49 min.
With Paul Kilb, Olympia Dukakis, Violet Roditi

Based on Markopoulos’s modernist reworking of the myth of Hippolytus, in which a chaste youth rejects the incestuous advances of his mother, Phaedre, and is saved from death by a caring physician, Twice a Man was filmed by Markopoulos in and around New York. For Markopoulos, this short feature represented his most elaborate attempt to date to create "a new narrative form through the fusion of the classic montage technique with a more abstract system." The film opens with an extended passage of black leader and the sound of falling rain before plunging into a dazzlingly complex array of interwoven single frames and clusters of images to elaborate a tale of artistic rebirth.