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March 13, 2007

Notes on Marie Menken

Martina Kudlacek's Notes on Marie Menken offers a much-needed portrait of one of the American avant-garde's forgotten filmmakers. Kudlacek's film serves less as a straight biography of Menken and more as a diffuse portrait of a virtually forgotten figure. Menken, whose poetic, observant films, influenced artists including Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas, later became known as one of Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls and was also the model for Martha in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

Kudlacek's documentary will frustrate viewers looking for a straight biographical approach to Menken. As Manohla Dargis observes, the documentary omits several important details about Menken's life, including the fact that she studied art at the Art Students League, and while the documentary mentions the death of a child, filmmaker Kenneth Anger has mentioned in other interviews being visited by a child of Menken's. Given the lack of knowledge about Menken (I knew little about her before watching this documentary), that may be a bit of a disservice, but Notes does emphasize the need to revisit an artist whose works are in danger of being lost to the ravages of time and fading memory, as well as the fragile materiality of the film medium. In addition, Notes effectively captures Menken's sense of wonder, her ability to see the beauty in everyday life.

Kudlacek depicts the fragility of cinematic memory through an early sequence in which we are led into a small storage closet in which many of Menken's films and collectibles are stored. Menken's nephew leads us into what seems like an abandoned space holding up rusting cans of film for our inspection. Many of the films have clearly been damaged, yet another reminder along the lines of Bill Morrison's Decasia, that too much of America's film history is in danger of being lost or becoming damaged beyond repair.

Of course, one of the strengths of Kudlacek's film is its compilation of many of Menken's most powerful films, providing viewers with an overview of Menken's eye for everyday life. While watching Menken's Glimpse of the Garden and Arabesque for Kenneth Anger, I found myself thinking about Benjamin's concept of unconscious optics, which he defined in "The Work of Art" as film's ability to reveal "entirely new structural formations of the subject." Menken's camera often focused on everyday details, seeing them in new ways while filming in a playful, often improvisational style, and as Anger observes in the documentary, Menken seemed especially interested in the play of light with the camera, which is evident during several of Menken's films. But one of the more compelling film clips is a playful "duel" with Andy Warhol using Bolex cameras on the top of a New York City building.

Finally, the film offers a number of valuable interviews with the avant-garde filmmakers and artists who ran with Menken, including Jonas Mekas, Kenneth Anger, and Gerard Malanga, who all provide background into Menken's life story. Mekas, in particular, reminisces about their shared Lithuanian heritage and praises Menken for her engagement with the everyday, an influence that is no doubt visible in Mekas's "home movie" approach to avant-garde filmmaking. Even though the film is short on biographical detail, these moments make Notes on Marie Menken well worth further attention, and the Menken footage left me wanting to learn more about Menken's work and her influence on other American avant-garde filmmakers.

Notes on Marie Menken is available from First Run/Icarus Films.

Posted by chuck at March 13, 2007 8:13 PM

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