The Dead Ones

About

Markopoulos shot The Dead Ones in early 1949 in Los Angeles on 35mm and dedicated it to fellow gay filmmaker Jean Cocteau. He began editing the film negative but wasn't able to make a work print for it so he left it at a film lab and only later reclaimed in in 1965 and decided to release it as is.¹

Artistic Criticism

David E. James compares this film to others made in San Francisco and Los Angeles in the 1940s and says they were contemporaneously understood as "film poems," a concept that Maya Deren was a pioneer and proponent of. And due to the minimal commercial potential for the film poem style, the films had an inherent deeper connection to the filmmaker's emotional and psychic situation.¹

James continues on to highlight the use of the built environment, namely the first freeways and Chinatown. He writes, "These environments metaphorically elaborate the dramatic relationships. The empy streets in the hills and the garish nighttime shop windows figure the characters' emotional isolation and their alienation, and the muddy grave under the freeway divides life from death like the Styx--even though, in an extraordinarily prescient anticipation of freeway architecture's subsequent iconographic plurivalency, as the sun finally shines through the overpass, it also figures redemption."¹

Additional Information

Film Culture (Spring 1964, Vol. 32) - "Interview with Gregory Markopoulos"