Updates, Live: Marie Menken, Visual Variations on Noguchi, 1945

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A voice occasionally says a word or two: "on the sidewalk" or "lithium" or a woman's name; a hand-held camera frames parts of sculptures, or moves across their surfaces, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, almost always in close-up; the soundtrack, in addition to the voice, is discordant music; light and shadows are paramount; sometimes the camera repeats up and down movements; once, a set of jump cuts brings an object closer; the music can be shrill in contrast to the sculptures; almost entirely of wood, they are the work of Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988): abstract, usually smooth and rounded, but not always (jhailey@hotmail.com).

A handheld camera permeating a studio full of statues (kind of huge abstract constructions: Noguchi's studio); starting to explore them, one by one, each one in relation with itself and with its constitutive parts, as to discover some holistic verities; each one in relation with the others, as to discover some conversation around; a conversation as a voiceless movement along the surface of the statue; sometimes very slow movements, sometimes rapid, sometimes like chaotic; wich makes sense, as any conversation has moments of slowness and of speed, moments of fluidity and of chaos.

Marie Menken made this 4-minute film in 1945. It was the first movie directed by her (she had previously collaborated with her husband Maas for The Geography of the Body in 1943). It seems to me that Menken tried to find an answer to this: can a movie force an art object (whose nature is intinsically static, focused on itself) to react to the context?

Well, here's the thing: the main personage in the drama is actually the camera. We expect a story told by the statues, we get it told by the camera - and imagined by the camera. We are interested to see how the statues react to the context, it is actually the camera that reacts. Earlier, by the end of the twenties Vertov had illustrated this in Человек с кино-аппаратом: a movie is a story told by the camera. And later, by the sixties, Brakhage would try to ultimately eliminate the camera in making his films, in his desire to get the story unmediated. Which is possible only in very few cases.

Marie Menken continued to create movies after her first one, and it would be interesting to analyse them, to see the relation between camera and image, the way the camera forces the image to create its story, the way the story is changed by the camera.