Psyche (1948)

Time intervenes with its habitual clemency. The centuries pass; manuscripts are recopied, arguments

abridged, doctrines sifted off their redundancies. And at last one perceives that this continual

abridgment and selection—observable in every province of spiritual activity—is itself nothing less

than the creative impulse. For it serves as the inlet through which a higher illumination enters,

instructing the mind to convey a larger meaning by simpler symbols. What, then, is a man? One might describe him as nature’s most delicate success in the enterprise of self-explication. Or again—as a landscape, though a curious one: more compact, more concentrated than the horizon hints at. The mountains, rivers, forests, and distances that geography disperses over weary miles are, in him, gathered inward and rendered intelligible. And from this compression springs his peculiar affection for myth and for nature alike. These passions represent a still finer success of condensation: the miles and tons of space and bulk omitted, their moral and spirit contracted into music—or, in a modern idiom, into the most lustrous stroke of the camera. Yet the artist is never at total liberty. He must employ the symbols available to him within the narrow circumference of his own day and providence if he wishes to convey an essence to mankind. The new in art, therefore, is never ex nihilo; it is perpetually formed out of the old. The artist impresses upon each work an ineffaceable seal, lending it that inexpressible allure which perplexes posterity. To the extent that the spiritual character of a period overpowers the individual artist and finds involuntary expression in his labor, the work acquires a peculiar grandeur. It becomes, for future beholders, a sign of something obscure yet commanding—the unknown, the inevitable, the divine. Obvious enough is exactly this inevitable element in the work possessing a value surpassing what individual talent alone could bestow. One sometimes has the impression that the artist’s chisel has been steadied—perhaps even guided—by a wise and anonymous hand, intent upon inscribing a line in the larger chronicle of humanity. Through such interventions the artifact becomes more than a display of skill. Seen from this vantage, the entire surviving product of the plastic arts acquires its highest value not merely as beauty but as history. Each sculpture, image or symbol becomes a record of that mysterious and perfect ordinance according to which all beings, knowingly or not, advance toward their appointed felicity. 
 

The cinematographic perspective along this line performs a curious transposition. In converting reality itself—into phainomenon, it might appear (at first glance, and somewhat scandalously) to reduce the divine to little more than a repertory of symbols arranged for the convenience of human consciousness. But the inversion is not so simple. For in that act another movement begins in the opposite direction. Human consciousness, far from merely receiving those symbols, is compelled to dilate under their pressure, until it becomes a vessel capable of containing its projection. This paradox is not without precedent. It has already occurred twice within the long evolution of the Western arts. The first instance arrived under the sign of exhaustion: the moment at which the antique theocracy—founded securely enough upon the authority of symbols—began to collapse under its own weight. The second appeared under the opposite sign, that of emergence: when modern consciousness, turning back upon itself in an unprecedented gesture of self-contemplation, began tentatively to erect the structures through which it might observe and thereby constitute itself. 

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The transformation of landscape in painting into a flattened, laterally sprawling experience of space occurred with a velocity that almost defies chronology, as if the very notion of recession so encoded in Renaissance tradition had been exiled, leaving the surface to assert itself as a stage upon which all orthogonals are subtly transposed into diagonals. Perspective was not abolished so much a insurgently counteracted: sharp value contrasts, the careful deployment of chromatic extremities, functioned as instruments of conversion, converting depth into a surface rhythm, a geometric choreography in which the eye’s accustomed trajectory was both invited and confounded. One might trace a cinematographic analogue to this achievement in Markopoulos’s Psyche, Lysis and Charmides (1948–1949), those early films wherein the pro-filmic space appeared, for the first time, in a skilled dialectic of symbolic and documentary perception, a flattening in which meaning itself seemed to merge, ineluctably, with mythic vision. Here, as in the structure and purpose of Platonic dialogues, these works present a moment in which aesthetics is reflexively conscious of the very conditions that conceive and sustain symbols. Markopoulos’s radical shift from studying symbols to studying the symbolizing itself corresponds, within art theory, to a method that regards all artistic phenomena as instantiations of a priori psychical categories, wherein style is less an effect than a problem of investigation, and all representation is contingent upon the kinetic and optical faculties that traverse the field. The kinesthesis of the actor’s body, struck with awe by the encompassing world, becomes a reduced enactment of the broader traversal effected by a network of embedded signs within a material and optical system. From this arises the dimension in which these films diverge decisively from a pictorial composition: the temporality of attention need not be dilated, no exhaustive survey of minutiae is required, for the viewer, in surrendering to the dialectic of space and symbol, enters a dream-like exaltation in which corporeality is suspended and one floats, disembodied, from scene to scene, among simulacra. The pleasure of this suspension derives not from empirical testing but from the simulacrum itself, wherein reality is manifested and simultaneously denied, a reality intensified by the absence of temporal or intellectual interpolation in the syntheses of montage operations. In the spirit of Goethe, who intuited that the sublime thrives in formlessness, in dusk and indeterminate shapes that overwhelm yet evade comprehension, the function of symbols in Markopoulos’s early work becomes manifest: when the world of articulate objects dissolves, perception evolves into a spatiality without things, and symbols—mirrors, fruit, chinaware, textiles, industrial scapes, the occasional flares of red—assert themselves not as historically legible icons but as indices of spatial and psychical comportment. Only when divorced from the encompassing spatiality do these signs risk reduction to mere legible motifs; otherwise, they remain anterior to hierarchization, active loci in an ongoing negotiation between reality and symbolization. In such a field, the collapse of space, symbol and object is no accident but a deliberate architectural gesture: gardens, stones, skies, ornamental density, all bear the trace of the symbol’s apprehension by the ousia from the vantage of perception itself. Two decades later, Robert Smithson’s Yucatán Mirror Displacements, evidences a comparable repose, a careful recalibration of physiooptical interrelation. Markopoulos’s achievement, then, was to destabilize the distinction between symbol and symbolization, perception and object, so that meaning is found not in the isolated emblem but in the process that capacitates the whole field that contains the emblem.