Join Robert Beavers for a conversation about the Temenos archive and the restoration process of Eniaios by Gregory Markopoulos.

The Temenos archive, currently based in Switzerland, was established as a monographic archive dedicated to the filmmakers Gregory J. Markopoulos and Robert Beavers. It comprises their original film materials, film prints and related documents. One of its main activities has been completing the restoration of Markopoulos’s epic, final film, Eniaios which was never printed during his lifetime. Filmmakers including Felix Schwyzer, Lucy Parker, Ian R. Wooldridge, James Edmonds, Alexandre Favre (with Yulia Mukha), Silvia das Fadas, Nina Zabicka, Alix Blevins, Melina Pafundi, Josef Grassl, Eva Claus, Fintan Fleischhacker and Christian Flemm have assisted Robert Beavers in this process. Since 2014, the restored cycles of Eniaios have been presented at open-air screenings at a site chosen by Markopoulos near Lyssarea, Greece.

“The primary contents of the Temenos archive — Gregory Markopoulos’s camera originals and papers and my own films and papers– remained in a Swiss vault from 1968 till 1993. This was the one fixed point in our nomadic and irregular existence.

Following Markopoulos’s death in 1992, I asked Thomas & Ruedi Bechtler to provide a space for the archive, first in Zürich-Altstetten then in Uster. On both occasions, architect Daniel Schedler designed the renovations and the creation of a temperature and humidity controlled area for the film material.

Markopoulos saw his writings as equal and complementary to his films. The archive contains his notebooks, collected essays and poetry, a diary in 52 volumes, and 30 volumes of letters. There are also circa one hundred and forty-four boxes of printed material, collected by the filmmaker to document the reception of his films from the 1940s onwards.

The biggest challenge is to preserve a filmmaker’s work during the years immediately following his or her death. Markopoulos multiplied the danger to his work by removing his films from distribution, and in leaving his last work, Eniaios, – nearly 80 hours of 16mm color reversal film – edited but unprinted.

My commitment, joined by the efforts of younger filmmakers, has saved the first forty hours of Eniaios I – XI,  and we continue to restore the remaining film orders. Our goal is to create a new awareness for ‘film as film’ and to see how one filmmaker’s vision of poetic cinema may nourish others.” (Robert Beavers, Temenos website)