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)

Marie Menken, Visual Variations on Noguchi, 1945

no copyright infringement intended

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.

excerpt from Visual Variantons on Noguchi
no copyright infringement intended

(Maas and Menken)

(Isamu Noguchi)

Willard Maas, Ben Moore, Mechanics of Love, 1955

Mechanics of Love
Image from the movie
(source: Alex on Film)
no copyright infringement intended

She is waiting for him naked, he takes off his clothes to join her in bed. That's porn you'd say. No shit? Here's the thing: during five minutes (presumably the intercourse duration), what we see on the screen is a chaotic float of mundane household objects, and what we hear is a chaotic dialog (or rather two intertwined monologs, each one chaotic in its own right) about very mundane activities. Well, we can talk about the way in which the choice of the household objects could suggest a correspondence with different moments of the intercourse, but I'll leave that to connaisseurs. The male personage is perhaps right, love in some ways is not always simple.

It was the third movie made by Willard Maas (this time co-director was Ben Moore, a constant collaborator of Maas). And putting Mechanics of Love in relation with the first film created by Maas (Geography of the Body - as the second seems difficult to find), both try to respond to a question tormenting many modern artists: what is the correpondence between image and the reality that it claims to represent.

Better said, what is the reality of the image? Magritte enonciated it in his famous Ceci n'est pas une pipe: the image of a pipe is just an image, you cannot smoke with it. Kiarostami and Panahi also are preoccupied in their movies with that question (to the point that Kiarostami's movies seem sometimes meta-movies).

Here, at Maas, it is about what image to be chosen by the artist to represent the intimacy of the body (Geography of the Body), or the intimacy of a couple (Mechanics of Love). The couple gets intimacy both in sex as in their day-to-day routines. We are very far from a porn movie, indeed.

Here is a link to watch the movie on youTube:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqqaSno6EoI

(Maas and Menken)

Willard Maas, Geography of the Body, 1943

Willard Maas
1906-1971
(image source: Experimental Cinema)
no copyright infringement intended

It was the first movie created by Willard Maas, in 1943; his next film (Image in the Snow) would come in 1952; bur let's go back to 1943, the year of the Geography of the Body; a 7 minutes black and white; Marie Menken did the cinematography, and George Barker authored the poem to be recited off-screen; two nude bodies (seemingly Maas and Menken themselves); the camera browsing them without any haste in extreme close-ups, from ear to nombril to eye to knee to mouth to tow, and so on, and so on; no genitalia showed (it was 1943, c'me on!); meanwhile George Barker (a poet considered a genius in his prime, largely forgotten nowadays) is heard reciting without any haste a strange litany, about ultimate experiences lived on ultimate settings; image and sound in counterpoint; a geography of the human body as a site of miriads of small exotic mysteries; a geography of the earth as a site of miriads of exotic spots of mysterious initiations.

The desire and pursuit of the whole
is called love - Aristophanes
(capture from the movie)
no copyright infringement intended

Maybe it is interesting to stay a little more on the relation image-sound here in this movie. It seems to me that here the relation is paradoxical. R. Bruce Elder comes with a  great interpretation (A Body of Vision: Representations of Body in Recent Filme and Poetry, Wilfried Laurier University Press, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, 1997, pages 36, 37): we would expect from the text to emphasize the meaning of the image, but here, the extravagance of the poem leaves the language in almost meaningless ruins, signaling the impulse to deal with energies that have a preverbal source; the image of a human body is an experience of a more primal sort than lenguages can accomodate.

And maybe we are not far from the universe of Rudolf Otto with his theories of Numinous.

Willard Maas, Geography of the Body
Reenactment by Rachel Dickson on Vimeo

(Maas and Menken)

(George Barker)

Maas and Menken

Marie Menken
source: Joseph J. Menkevich (Bigjoe5216)
no copyright infringement intended

Marie Menken, and her 16 mm Bolex camera. The photo is part of Menken's family archive and it was uploaded on the web by her nephew, Joseph J. Menkevich - a family originary from Lithuania, the parents (Petras Menkevicius and Mary Kicis) were born around 1875 and immigrated to US some time before 1900.

Menken started her career as an artist painter, soon being irresistibly attracted by filmmaking, or more precisely by experimenting in filmmaking. Later she would try to explain her ways:

There is no why for my making films. I just liked the twitters of the machine, and since it was an extension of painting for me, I tried it and loved it. In painting I never liked the staid and static, always looked for what would change the source of light and stance, using glitters, glass beads, luminous paint, so the camera was a natural for me to try – but how expensive! (wiki)

Marie Menken and her husband Willard Maas - a couple of great innovative artists at the middle of  the twentieth century in New York, experimenting new ways in cinematography, mentoring younger filmmakers, and enjoying a great bohemian life style. Their friend Andy Warhol described the two guys as the last of the great bohemians, writing and filming and drinking, involved with all the modern poets — ‘scholarly drunks’ (wiki). And perhaps the most moving hommage came from another friend of them, Edward Albee, with his Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? - the adorable George and Martha in the play were actually modeled after Maas and Menken.

Warhol, and Albee, and Maas, and Menken - all friends, the same great generation of the middle of the twentieth century.

• Virginia Woolf (and Edward Albee)
• Geography of the Body
• Mechanics of Love
• Visual Variations on Noguchi
• Lights

(By Brakhage)

Virginia Woolf (and Edward Albee)

Virginia Woolf in 1902
by George Charles Beresford
(source: wikimedia)
no copyright infringement intended

My first encounter with the name of Virginia Woolf took place in Bucharest, by the mid of the seventies. At the National Theater, Radu Beligan and Marcela Rusu, Valeria Seciu and Costel Constantin were playing George and Martha, Honey and Nick, the old couple and the young one, in Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. My knowledge of modern English literature (and generally of modern literature) was next to nothing. I had read a decent number of authors, but all of them were from the 19th century. A Romanian book about the post-war English and American theater had come just in time to show me new horizons (together with a long article published in one of the few liberal magazines allowed to exist in the Communist country that was by then Romania). It was a period of cultural opening (it didn't last long, that's another story), and some of these English or American guys began to be staged in one or another of the Bucharest theaters. So I went to see Albee's play, eager to swallow that modern mentality, to get familiar with that world, as much as I could. You know, I was young and enthusiastic.

It was much later that I understood that the name of Virginia Woolf was used in the play just as a pun (as well as the names of George and Martha: just another pun - a reference this time to George Washington and his wife). Irreverent puns? Well, yes, young rebels are always irreverent.

I was no more young when I had the occasion to visit Washington's places, a great journey that I made on the Potomac, admiring the view of all those superb manors strung on the Virginian shore between Alexandria and Mount Vernon, enduring a heavy rain (sheltered under the boat's roof), and listening to the stories of the captain, a guy with a respectable white beard pretending to be an old buccaneer. As I said, I was no more young, and through the years I had got the habit to be sometimes irreverent myself (for good or bad reasons). So all kind of puns (some of them innocent) came to my mind as I was walking through Washington's manor, or along the houses of his slaves, or in the exhibition showing his farming preoccupations (or just listening to the story of his false teeth).

And much, much later, I learned that George and Martha from Albee's play were based on a real couple famous in the New York artistic world of the fifties, Willard Maas and Marie Menken. A great couple, promoting the new trends, with a formidable vision of what the arts should become, mentoring the young artists, instilling in them the courage to experiment. And yes, the two having a well known tempestuous relationship. Albee knew them well and actually Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf was a subtle tribute, an accolade if you like, a modern form of tribute (irreverent and paradoxical, why not?) paid to these promoters of modernity. I have to tell you sometime about the movies they made these two guys, Maas and Menken, and about their importance in the modernist movement of that epoch.

And perhaps I should tell you also about my other encounters with the name of Virginia Woolf.

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Arrangements
• Michael Cunningham
• The Discreet Charm of a Manhattan Afternoon
• The Last Word: Edward Albee

(A Life in Books)

(Maas and Menken)