Notes on Marie Menken
Notes on Marie Menken (Directed by Martina Kudlacek, 2006) Born in 1910, Marie Menken was one of the originals of the New York underground film scene, long before the term “underground” even existed. Working with her husband, Willard Maas, she began working in the 1940s on a variety of short experimental films, all of which were marked by her lyricism, grace, and simplicity. As the two founding members of The Gryphon Group, Menken and Maas collaborated informally on several of Maas films, such as Geography of the Body (1943) and Image in The Snow (1952), but Maas’ films were often rather grandiose and somewhat pretentious, while Menken’s works are a lightness of touch that is hers alone. In such brief films as Visual Variations on Noguchi (1945), an homage to the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi; Hurry! Hurry! (1957), in which male sperm flutter by on the screen in microscopic photography; Dwightiana (1957), a stop motion animation using beads and scraps of paper, made “to entertain a sick friend”; and Andy Warhol (1965), at 22 minutes one of the longest of her films, and one of the few films shot at Warhol’s silver factory that actually show the artist at work, Menken forged a sensibility that was uniquely her own, in which the camera became a gently interrogating presence in her hands.
In addition, Menken kept a epigrammatic film diary, which eventually surfaced in her compilation film Notebook (1963), which was comprised of clips of Marie’s filmmaking, going back as far back as the late 1940s, and presented life in the city as a series of gently abstract visual poems. Marie was a large woman, rather bulky, and yet she projected an air of quiet gentility and modesty, unlike Willard, who was often quite pugnacious and voluble on his life and work. Marie used her Bolex camera to record little scraps of life around her, bringing the most mundane activities into the realm of the miraculous.
As Menken said in 1966, “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!” And yet, although she struggled financially to make these little films, in the end, they amount to an indispensable record of a time and place now lost to authentic recall.
Marie was also very much “on the scene” as the New York avant-garde film world evolved, and as the 1940s and the era of Maya Deren gave way to the 1960s and the world of Andy Warhol, Marie kept right up with the changing times, although she was by that time one of the “senior members” of the underground cinema. Gravitating to Warhol’s studio, she began appearing in a series of his films, most notably in The Life of Juanita Castro (1965), a satire from a script by Ron Tavel, in which Marie plays Juanita, who, according to the original press handout, “criticizes her brother [Fidel]’s regime and condemns the infiltration of homosexuality into their lives”. Warhol shoots this bizarre agitprop play from a side view, so that when one of the actors rises to directly address the “camera,” they in fact walk directly out of the frame. In 1966, Marie appeared as underground filmmaker and “superstar” Gerard Malanga’s “mother” in Warhol’s Chelsea Girls, screaming insults at Malanga while beating a bed with a whip. The casting was apt, as Malanga had been a protégé of Marie’s and Willard’s when Malanga first came on the scene in the early 1960s, and soon gravitated to Warhol’s Factory, where Malanga became one of the central figures in Warhol’s artistic evolution from 1963 to 1970, and one of Marie’s staunchest supporters in the new artistic milieu of the 1960s.
Appropriately, Malanga gets a chance to talk about Marie’s work at considerable length in Notes on Marie Menken, and Kudlacek also uses a good number of judiciously chosen clips from Menken’s films to help bring the world of the artist to light. There are interviews with Kenneth Anger, Jonas Mekas, and others who knew Marie and loved her work, and the images and recollections are perhaps the strongest part of the film. If nothing else, the film brings back to life the work of Marie Menken, and rescues her from the margins of cinematic history, restoring her to a position as one of experimental cinema’s foremost, and most pioneering, feminist filmmaker.
Marie herself would have laughed at such a description; a no-nonsense realist, she took life as it came, and made her films sing despite the various obstacles, both financial and personal, that life placed in front of her. The end of her life, it must be said, was not pretty. Four days after her death, on January 2, 1971, her husband Willard Maas died, from all accounts, of the heartbreak of being deprived of his lifetime companion, no matter how fractious their relationship often was. Notes on Marie Menken is a fitting tribute to a quiet, self-effacing, but ultimately transcendent filmmaker, and is warmly recommended, both for the memories it evokes, and for the images of Marie’s that it brings back into public view.
Wheeler Winston Dixon University of Nebraska, Lincoln wdixon@unlserve.unl.edu
