Films
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Wrestling
Marie Menken16mm, black and white, silent, 8 minRental format: 16mm - Read MoreExperimental
Lights
Marie Menken16mm, color, silent, 6.5 minRental formats: 16mm, Digital file - Read MoreExperimental
11 Titles by Marie Menken DVD compilation
Marie MenkenDVD , color and b/w, silent and sound, 70 minRental format: DVD NTSC - Read MoreExperimental
Visual Variations On Noguchi
Marie Menken16mm, black and white, sound, 4 minRental format: 16mm - Read MoreExperimental
Glimpse of the Garden
Marie Menken16mm, color, sound, 5 minRental formats: 16mm, Digital file - Read MoreExperimental
Hurry! Hurry!
Marie Menken16mm, color, sound, 3 minRental format: 16mm - Read MoreExperimental
Dwightiana
Marie Menken16mm, color, sound, 3.5 minRental format: 16mm - Read MoreExperimental
Arabesque for Kenneth Anger
Marie Menken16mm, color, sound, 4 minRental format: 16mm - Read MoreExperimental
Drips In Strips
Marie Menken16mm, color, silent, 2.5 minRental format: 16mm - Read MoreExperimental
Eye Music in Red Major
Marie Menken16mm, color, silent, 5.5 minRental format: 16mm - Read MoreExperimental
Bagatelle for Willard Maas
Marie Menken16mm, color, sound, 5 minRental format: 16mm - Read MoreExperimental
Notebook
Marie Menken16mm, color and b/w, silent, 10 minRental format: 16mm - Read MoreExperimental
Moonplay
Marie Menken16mm, black and white, sound, 5 minRental format: 16mm - Read MoreExperimental
Go Go Go
Marie Menken16mm, color, silent, 11.5 minRental format: 16mm - Read MoreDocumentaryExperimental
Visions of Warhol
Marie Menkenblack and white, silent and sound, 56 minRental format: DVD PAL - Read MoreExperimental
Mood Mondrian
Marie Menken16mm, color, silent, 5.5 minRental format: 16mm - Read MoreExperimental
Andy Warhol
Marie Menken16mm, color, silent, 22 minRental format: 16mm - Read MoreExperimental
Sidewalks/Wrestling/Notebook
Marie Menken16mm, color and b/w, silent, 27 minRental format: 16mm - Read MoreExperimental
Sidewalks
Marie Menken16mm, black and white, silent, 6.5 minRental format: 16mm - Read MoreExperimental
Watts With Eggs
Marie Menken16mm, color, silent, 2.25 minRental format: 16mm - Read MoreExperimental
Excursion
Marie Menken16mm, color, silent, 5.13 minRental format: 16mm
Biography
Marie Menken (1910-1970) is the unsung heroine of the American avant-garde cinema. A mentor, muse and major influence for such key experimental filmmakers as Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas and Andy Warhol, Menken created an extraordinary body of exuberant and stunningly beautiful films shaped, above all, by her intuitive understanding of handheld cinematography. Beginning with her celebrated first film, Visual Variations on Noguchi (1945), Menken used the hand-cranked Bolex camerafavored by avant-garde filmmakers to introduce a new agility, grace and spontaneity into experimental cinema, a lightness of camera and form hitherto unseen in American film. With Noguchi, Menken also began a spirited dialogue between cinema and the plastic and painterly arts that extends across her films in a witty yet deeply insightful exploration of the formal language and methodology specific to those schools and painters with whom Menken was close – from the Abstract Expressionist drip painting humorously critiqued in Drips in Strips (1963), to the factory production of Pop art in the revelatory Andy Warhol (1964) and the Fluxus practice of Robert Watts in Watts with Eggs (1967).
The longtime creative and marital partner of poet-filmmaker Willard Maas, Menken began as an accomplished painter whose eccentrically textured and effulgent canvases incorporate all manner of reflective media – phosphorescent paint, crushed glass, sequins – in a playful challenge to the traditional boundaries of the painted canvas. Light remained a major focus of Menken's films, most notably in major works such as Notebook (1940-62) and Lights (1964-66) which transform her Bolex into an instrument for painting marvelous sculptural forms from neon and city lights. Like the painters-turned-filmmakers Robert Breer and Carmen D'Avino, Menken (who animated the chess sequence in Maya Deren's At Land) embraced various animation techniques – collage, stop-motion cinematography – as a direct extension of her painting. Yet for Menken, animation also became a way of radically transforming the world around her, reimagining postwar New York City, for example, in her masterpiece of single frame cinematography Go! Go! Go! (1962-64), a work that condenses two years of patient documentary filmmaking into a delirious and exhilarating vision of a hyperactive city.
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