A lost silent film about art's forgotten father, locked away in a Swiss archive for 50+ years.
An experimental short film by Greek-American filmmaker Gregory J. Markopoulos. The film was shot in Florence and is a silent 16 mm film that has not been publicly screened and is housed in the Temenos Archive in Zurich. The title of the film refers to Giovanni Cimabue (1240–1302), an Italian painter who is considered one of Italy's first great painters and represents a transitional figure between medieval and early Renaissance painting.
Direction
Markopoulos's radical frame-by-frame editing — pure visual music.
Cinematography
16mm Florence light, captured like a prayer to dead painters.
Director
Gregory J. Markopoulos
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
The Temenos Archive represents one of cinema's most extreme acts of withdrawal — Markopoulos rejected distribution entirely, believing his work required ritualized, almost religious presentation.
Cimabue's historical reputation rests on only two confirmed surviving paintings; Markopoulos's film similarly exists in deliberate scarcity, as if scarcity itself were aesthetic strategy.
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