Twice a Man | |
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![]() 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 |
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Running time | 49 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Twice a Man is a 1963 American avant-garde film directed by Gregory Markopoulos.
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]
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]
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]
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]
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]