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]
Themes
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]
Release
A 1965 advertisement for Du sang de la volupte et de la mort and Twice a Man
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 [fr] 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] A re-edited version of Twice a Man was screened at the 1997 New York Film Festival.[18]
Reception
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".[19] 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.[20] 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 [fr].[21] The film is now part of Anthology Film Archives' Essential Cinema Repertory collection.[22]
_advertisement.jpg)
