Surreal geographies: Gregory Markopoulos’s Flowers of Asphalt

Gregory J. Markopoulos’s short silent film Flowers of Asphalt is a surrealistic study of a young man’s journey through a revelatory daytime dreamscape, a ‘coming out’, set inside the home, on the streets and at the amusement park. Flowers of Asphalt explores the disengaged realism of a waking dreamer – featuring medium and close-up shots, static images, shot-reverse shots and location footage – as the dreamer awakens into a surreal-inflected fantasy. Markopoulos’s experimental narrative presents a release from proscriptive post-war images of domesticity and normative forms of heterosexual behaviour, emancipating the imagination from clinical impositions of space and time, where sexual ‘others’ may roam.