Himself As Herself

One of the most vertiginous of Markopoulos’s interior landscape studies, Himself as Herself is based loosely on Balzac’s Séraphita. The film consists of a shimmering, nearly plotless evocation of gender identity in flux, and it contains some of Markopoulos’s most haunting, densely interlaced images. Markopoulos portrays a hermaphrodite body, its movements, postures and gestures or expressions, a study of a highly stylized inner landscape that takes Bresson’s ideals to their ultimate conclusions. This film is dedicated to the American artist Emlen Pope Etting and features a musical excerpt from Poulenc’s “Gloria.”