Marie Menken, Lights, 1966

(image source: letterbox)
no copyrigyt infringement intended

Made during the brief Christmas-lit season, usually between the hours of midnight and 1:00 A.M., when vehicle and foot traffic was light, over a period of three years. Based on store decorations, window displays, fountains, public promenades, Park Avenue lights, building and church facades. I had to keep my camera under my coat to warm it up, as the temperature was close to zero much of the time (Marie Menken)

Menken finished the work at this 6 minute film in 1966, and terms like augmented, or virtual reality would come decades later; and just such terms of nowadays would come to mind when watching Lights; in other of her movies (like in her 1944 Visual Variations of Noguchi, for instance) she was exploring the objects trying to make them active parteners in the play; here in Lights it's different; Menken gives up any effort to show us the reality she films; here she goes beyond the world of the objects to find out something more fundamental; here the effort is to surpass even Plato's cave, so to speak; and the result is an epiphany.

Marie Menken, Lights, 1966
(video by Fuchsia Swing)

(Maas and Menken)