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)