Marie Menken utjecala je na Warhola, Angera, Mekasa i Brakhagea a prema njoj je stvoren ženski lik u drami/filmu Tko se boji Virginie Woolf?
Marie Menken was born Marie Menkevicius in New York City on May 25, 1909, the daughter of Catholic Lithuanian immigrants. She grew up in Brooklyn with a brother and a sister, in a home used to frequent financial difficulties. Both she and her sister Adele later changed their surname to Menken. Marie Menken and Willard Maas had got married in 1937, moving into a Brooklyn penthouse at 62 Montague Street which they would inhabit until their deaths. She died on December 29, 1970. Four days after her death, on January 2, 1971, Willard Maas died.
Marie Menken Notebook
American filmmaker Marie Menken was born on this day in 1909. It was through Charles Henri Ford, as we have seen, that Menken first came into contact with Andy Warhol. Martina Kudláček’s 2006 documentary Notes on Marie Menken (which I can’t recommend highly enough) preserves an encounter between the two on the roof of Menken’s apartment building, in which they spar with cameras, circling each other, lunging and generally goofing off in a way we wouldn’t ordinarily associate with the inscrutable Pope of Pop.
In 1965 Menken produced a short film portrait of Warhol at the Factory. Warhol’s long-term assistant Gerard Malanga, for whom Menken was a kind of mother figure, also features prominently. The pair work with an industry which lives up to the Factory’s name, reminding us that Warhol’s studio wasn’t just a crèche for speed-crazed socialites.
Much of Andy Warhol (in two parts, below) is shot at the frenetic pace familiar from earlier Menken films such as Go! Go! Go!. There’s Warhol making silkscreen prints of Jackie Kennedy, Warhol walking past said images in a repeating loop like a cheap Hanna-Barbera cartoon backdrop, Warhol wrapping Brillo boxes for an exhibition. At the gallery opening, the social whirl speeds up to a blur. One of the few reflective moments in the film comes when Menken goes to an industrial facility where actual Brillo boxes are being loaded onto trucks. She seems to define the art world as a heedless rush of mass production and grinding routine compared to the more rarefied realm of manufacturing and dispatch.
Menken’s best-known cinematic association with Andy Warhol came the following year, with her role in his film Chelsea Girls. It’s unfortunate that her appearance preserves little of the ingenuity, warmth and generosity of spirit remarked upon by all who knew her. Instead she turned in the kind of drunken, cantankerous rant she would occasionally direct at her closeted husband Willard Maas, episodes which so inspired Edward Albee as he was writing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
- strangeflowers.wordpress.com/
Visual Variations on Noguchi (1945) "Poetry of natural sound" score by Lucia Dlugoszewski.
"By use of hand-held, ambulating camera, unusual editing and a startling experimental score by Lucille Dlugozewski, the sculptures of the famous Japanese-American artist, Isamu Noguchi, are given audacious movement in a controversial art-film experiment." -- Cinema 16
"Never before have I seen such purely dynamic treatment of sculpture in film. Marie Menken has successfully transformed Noguchi's sculpture into her own medium." -- Norman McLaren (The Film-Makers' Cooperative)
Glimpse of the Garden (1957) Filmed in a garden through a powerful magnifying glass, filmmaker Marie Menken's Glimpse of the Garden is a simple visual poem accompanied by the sound of birdsongs. When Glimpse of the Garden was shown at the Cinemathèque Française in 1963, Jonas Mekas reported that the French audience laughed at it, embarrassed by the film's benign simplicity. Suffice it to say that Glimpse of the Garden represents Menken's interest in pure visuals and essentially feminine point-of-view
Go! Go! Go! (1962-1964) Yet for Menken, animation also became a way of radically transforming the world around her, reimagining postwar New York City, for example, in her masterpiece of single frame cinematography Go! Go! Go! (1962-64), a work that condenses two years of patient documentary filmmaking into a delirious and exhilarating vision of a hyperactive city.
| Notebook (1963) |
Duration: 10' 37" Regarding Notebook, filmmaker Marie Menken once stated that "these are too tiny or too obvious for comment, but one or two are my dearest children." Menken was being far too humble, as Notebook is considered by many aficionados of experimental cinema as being her greatest work. Notebook was assembled in 1962 and 1963 from bits and pieces of films Menken had shot over the years; some of these short takes date as far back as the late '40s. Individual segments are organized into brief chapters, which include such experiments as single-frame footage of neon signs at night, single-frame footage of the moon, a shot of a leaf collecting water in a light rainstorm, and others. Stan Brakhage stayed with Menken and her husband, Willard Maas, when he first settled in New York in the 1950s. Brakhage was shown many of the individual pieces that ultimately made up Notebook, and later gladly acknowledged his own stylistic debt to them, which is most readily apparent in Brakhage's Anticipation of the Night (1958). ~ David Lewis, All Movie Guide In a remarkable series of disarmingly unpretentious films she demonstrated a rhythmic inventiveness perhaps previously unmatched in the cinema. In Notebook she stored fragments from all phases of her filmic career, from the mid-forties to the late sixties. There we can see how, at a time when most of her contemporaries were invoking the Dionysian imagination in their invented imagery, Menken was exploring the dynamics of the edge of the screen and playing with the opposition of immanent and imposed rhythm. The exquisite early Raindrops dramatizes the subtle wit of her vision of the perceptual model. As she waits behind the camera for a drop of rain on the tip of a leaf to gather sufficient mass to fall, we sense her impatience and even anxiety lest the film will run out on her; so an unseen hand taps the branch, forcing the drops to fall. Tampering this way with an otherwise straightforward observational film is characteristic of Menken, who cheerfully incorporates the extraneous reflection of herself and her camera, even her cigarette smoke, into an animated fragment and who makes the very nervous instability of the hand-held camera a part of the rhythmic structure of several films. |
| Lights (1964-66) |
Duration: 5' 52" "Marie Menken's Lights is a film of such joy, such pure sensual beauty, that it is breathtaking and overwhelming. In just seven minutes, with a breakneck sequence of abstract, colorful images of lights floating in a black nighttime field, Menken delivers an intoxicating visual experience. It's an abstracted vision, like the work of Stan Brakhage, a celebration of light and color in which each frame is alive with furious scribbles of blurred light and tangled rainbow beams. It's as though Menken is drawing with light by shaking her camera, unleashing small hash marks of white light and amber curlicues that twist around each other. Through Menken's expressive stylization, the marks and lines of these lights become a form of handwriting, an abstract language inscribed in the twists and turns of motion-blurred neon, car brake lights and Christmas decorations. The film was assembled over the course of three years, during which Menken shot Christmas window displays and other seasonal decorations, working mostly late in the night, when she could be alone in the darkness with these vibrant beacons. " "The resulting film is truly a visceral experience like no other, matched only by the best of Brakhage's light works. Menken molds and shapes light into alien structures, destabilizing the familiar into a blur of fleeting sensory impressions. The film opens with shots of multi-colored Christmas lanterns hanging in a tree. Menken's camera at first patiently pans across these lights, capturing their vibrant glow, their definite shapes: bell-like cups when viewed from the sides, becoming sun-shaped circles with white-hot centers when viewed from below. Then her camera begins to shake, to disrupt the stability of these images, transforming the concrete into the ephemeral. Little white dashes dance across the frame, moving parallel to the motion of the camera, sometimes darting sideways across the frame, sometimes falling like rain. Menken's moving camera creates designs by stretching out a single point of light into a line, as though tracing with a white pen across a black sheet of paper." "From this dazzling abstraction, Menken steps back to reveal the source of these light patterns, as she twirls her camera around to make the giant Rockefeller Center Christmas tree do a 360-degree turn through the night, and then sets off on a whirlwind tour through the city's streets. Everywhere, there is light. A church is defined by the lights at its borders, the black foundation of the building seemingly a negative space surrounded by crisp rows of circular lights. Menken captures momentary hints of religious sentiment amidst all this bombast: a cross in lights, glowing palely in utter darkness, a rapid tracking shot across a nativity scene where Mary and the wise men are bathed in a gaudy Las Vegas neon aura emanating from somewhere nearby. These are ephemeral reminders of the origins of this celebration, the reason for all this festivity and brilliance. Blink, and you'll miss it: a recurring theme in Menken's fast-paced, sensually exciting work, of which this film is quite possibly the apex." "From here, she's back out into the streets: images of cars, their brake lights glowing red, set off against blue dots the origins of which are more obscure. And then she shatters even this hint of the familiar, further blurring the speeding traffic into curving, bouncing lines, a trail of red lights tracing across one side of the frame with shaky white lines staggering across the other. As the pace picks up, Menken ventures further and further into abstraction, layering multiple exposures and reducing all the light and motion to cryptic calligraphic marks in the darkness, squiggles and check marks and amorphous suggestions of form. Tight clusters of these marks seem to dance across the frame, as though performing some arcane choreography, a Busby Berkeley number as performed by a chorus line of neutrons and electrons, a subatomic musical extravaganza taking place in a silent vacuum." "Increasingly, Menken abstracts the imagery even as she incorporates more recognizably photographic exposures. A star field in which gray scratched lines hover like graphite scrapings or stalks of spiky grass. A skeletal outline of a metal globe, gray spirals, splotches of red like blood or paint, dots of light in the dark. A long view of the city skyline from across the water, with strange UFO-like bursts of light floating in the darkness. These images are haunting and beautiful, and Menken's approach makes Lights a kind of sensory fever dream. She makes these external phenomena — the properties of light as it is refracted and processed by her camera — internal and introspective, dream images dancing across the inside of the viewer's closed eyelids. It is a deeply subjective perspective, utilizing objective phenomena, like the way light behaves when it is photographed in certain ways, to create a complex inner landscape. And in its off-kilter beauty, it is a surprisingly moving film, discovering pathos and warmth in its brilliant abstractions.." |
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“Notes on Marie Menken” shines a quavering if welcome ray of light on a largely forgotten figure in the American avant-garde film scene of the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, a strange, unwieldy figure who, moreover, happened to be the inspiration for that harridan of all times: Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
Until now, if you had wanted to know about Marie Menken, a Brooklyn-based exhibited painter turned experimental filmmaker, whose sphere of influence included not just Edward Albee but also Stan Brakhage and that ageless enfant terrible Kenneth Anger, your search would have been mostly relegated to the margins. She pops up a few times in P. Adams Sitney’s history of American avant-garde cinema, “Visionary Film,” and makes minor appearances in books about Andy Warhol, in part because of her gargoyle-like appearance in his 1966 dual-screen epic, “The Chelsea Girls.” Wearing a wide-brimmed hat and beaded necklace, her eyes nearly swallowed up by the puffy swells of her face, Ms. Menken strikes a singularly unglamorous, obstreperous note in the film: the Superstar as babushka.
She was in her mid-50s when she appeared in “The Chelsea Girls” and easily looked 20 years older. By then she had shot a number of ephemerally beautiful, short personal films, some of which she bundled together with deliberate casualness and called “Notebook.” Her nominal subjects in these and other films were seemingly straightforward and simple — a nodding flower, a droplet of rain on a leaf, showily patterned tiles, a gurgling fountain, pigeons tracing loops across the sky — but only in the way that everyday life is straightforward, simple and profound. You feel Ms. Menken’s presence in every gently trembling shot, which seems to quiver with the excitement of life, as if she were discovering the world anew in each image.
The joyfulness of those images feels at odds with that bloated figure presented by Warhol in “The Chelsea Girls.” Martina Kudlacek, the director of “Notes on Marie Menken,” isn’t all that big on the finer points of biography, so the viewer is left more or less alone to bridge the apparent divide between the filmmaker and her work. There are clues, including her husband’s homosexuality. Ms. Menken might have been happy in her marriage to the filmmaker and writer Willard Maas, but it’s hard not to think that there was some pain mixed in with all that bohemian free loving and living. Certainly the couple’s monumental boozing and arguing, which inspired Mr. Albee so memorably, suggests that there might have been some self-medication in the mix.
In his touching Village Voice obituary for Ms. Menken, who died in 1970 at 61 after a short illness, Jonas Mekas wrote: “There was a very lyrical soul behind that huge and very often sad bulk of a woman, and she put all that soul into her work. The bits of the songs that we used to sing together were about the flower garden, about a young girl tending her flower garden. Marie’s films were her flower garden. Whenever she was in her garden, she opened her soul, with all her secret wishes and dreams. They are all very colorful and sweet and perfect, and not too bulky, all made and tended with love, her little movies.”
What Mr. Mekas doesn’t mention is that the title subject in one of Ms. Menken’s earliest films, “Glimpse of the Garden,” belonged to one of her husband’s former male lovers. (This intimate connection might explain why the film is not titled “Glimpse of a Garden.”) There is something terribly moving about this biographical detail, which goes unmentioned in the documentary as well, because it suggests a generosity of soul — or, perhaps, more rightly, an insistence on life and self-affirmation — already evident in Ms. Menken’s images. Behind these delicate yet resilient, unmistakably feminized flowers, we intuit someone who could find beauty in the world, no matter how badly that world might have treated her. And not just find beauty, but also return it to the world, though on her own emphatic terms.
Ms. Kudlacek omits much: she never tells us whether Ms. Menken formally studied art (she did, including at the Art Students League); it’s even unclear if she and Mr. Maas had any children. The death of a child is mentioned almost in passing in the film, but in a published interview Mr. Anger, who lived with the couple for a short time, mentions visits from a son.
Still, salient details and observations emerge in the documentary, principally through interviews with the likes of the painter and filmmaker Alfred Leslie and especially the poet and photographer Gerard Malanga, who studied with Mr. Maas and whose tender recollections of Ms. Menken suggest that, while any biological children remain shrouded in mystery, there were loving surrogates nonetheless. Marie Menken’s garden bloomed, and not only on film.
Until now, if you had wanted to know about Marie Menken, a Brooklyn-based exhibited painter turned experimental filmmaker, whose sphere of influence included not just Edward Albee but also Stan Brakhage and that ageless enfant terrible Kenneth Anger, your search would have been mostly relegated to the margins. She pops up a few times in P. Adams Sitney’s history of American avant-garde cinema, “Visionary Film,” and makes minor appearances in books about Andy Warhol, in part because of her gargoyle-like appearance in his 1966 dual-screen epic, “The Chelsea Girls.” Wearing a wide-brimmed hat and beaded necklace, her eyes nearly swallowed up by the puffy swells of her face, Ms. Menken strikes a singularly unglamorous, obstreperous note in the film: the Superstar as babushka.
She was in her mid-50s when she appeared in “The Chelsea Girls” and easily looked 20 years older. By then she had shot a number of ephemerally beautiful, short personal films, some of which she bundled together with deliberate casualness and called “Notebook.” Her nominal subjects in these and other films were seemingly straightforward and simple — a nodding flower, a droplet of rain on a leaf, showily patterned tiles, a gurgling fountain, pigeons tracing loops across the sky — but only in the way that everyday life is straightforward, simple and profound. You feel Ms. Menken’s presence in every gently trembling shot, which seems to quiver with the excitement of life, as if she were discovering the world anew in each image.
The joyfulness of those images feels at odds with that bloated figure presented by Warhol in “The Chelsea Girls.” Martina Kudlacek, the director of “Notes on Marie Menken,” isn’t all that big on the finer points of biography, so the viewer is left more or less alone to bridge the apparent divide between the filmmaker and her work. There are clues, including her husband’s homosexuality. Ms. Menken might have been happy in her marriage to the filmmaker and writer Willard Maas, but it’s hard not to think that there was some pain mixed in with all that bohemian free loving and living. Certainly the couple’s monumental boozing and arguing, which inspired Mr. Albee so memorably, suggests that there might have been some self-medication in the mix.
In his touching Village Voice obituary for Ms. Menken, who died in 1970 at 61 after a short illness, Jonas Mekas wrote: “There was a very lyrical soul behind that huge and very often sad bulk of a woman, and she put all that soul into her work. The bits of the songs that we used to sing together were about the flower garden, about a young girl tending her flower garden. Marie’s films were her flower garden. Whenever she was in her garden, she opened her soul, with all her secret wishes and dreams. They are all very colorful and sweet and perfect, and not too bulky, all made and tended with love, her little movies.”
What Mr. Mekas doesn’t mention is that the title subject in one of Ms. Menken’s earliest films, “Glimpse of the Garden,” belonged to one of her husband’s former male lovers. (This intimate connection might explain why the film is not titled “Glimpse of a Garden.”) There is something terribly moving about this biographical detail, which goes unmentioned in the documentary as well, because it suggests a generosity of soul — or, perhaps, more rightly, an insistence on life and self-affirmation — already evident in Ms. Menken’s images. Behind these delicate yet resilient, unmistakably feminized flowers, we intuit someone who could find beauty in the world, no matter how badly that world might have treated her. And not just find beauty, but also return it to the world, though on her own emphatic terms.
Ms. Kudlacek omits much: she never tells us whether Ms. Menken formally studied art (she did, including at the Art Students League); it’s even unclear if she and Mr. Maas had any children. The death of a child is mentioned almost in passing in the film, but in a published interview Mr. Anger, who lived with the couple for a short time, mentions visits from a son.
Still, salient details and observations emerge in the documentary, principally through interviews with the likes of the painter and filmmaker Alfred Leslie and especially the poet and photographer Gerard Malanga, who studied with Mr. Maas and whose tender recollections of Ms. Menken suggest that, while any biological children remain shrouded in mystery, there were loving surrogates nonetheless. Marie Menken’s garden bloomed, and not only on film.
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