Human Flower Project

Friday, February 16, 2007

Marie Menken: Avant Youtube

An avant-garde artist and garden stumbler is remembered in a documentary, and even better, through her own glowing films.

Marie Menken dancing w/ Tennessee Williams

Photo: Factory made

Before she donned the big hat as an extra in Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls or played lumbering Muse to the New York (male) avant-garde, Marie Menken was making movies. She was an abstract painter, and turned an abstractionist’s fascination with rhythm, color and texture into short experimental films, lots of them,  mostly 3-7 minutes long.

Jonas Mekas wrote in her obituary (1970), “Marie’s films were her flower garden. Whenever she was in her garden, she opened her soul, with all her secret wishes and dreams.”

This weekend her 1957 work Glimpse of the Garden will be shown along with more than a dozen of her other films at Anthology Film Archives in New York City. Occasioning this Menken revival is a documentary by Marie Kudlacek, Notes on Marie Menken, which is showing at the same location, 7 and 9 pm, through Sunday. But from what we can tell, it’s the rarely screened Menken films themselves that are most exciting.

From Glimpse of the Garden

by Marie Menken (1909-1970)

Source: Ubuweb

“Marie was one of the first filmmakers to improvise with the camera and edit while shooting,” Mekas wrote. “She filmed with her entire body, her entire nervous system. You can feel Marie behind every image.”

It’s true. With a thousand thanks to UBUWEB, we can watch Glimpse of the Garden online. All you need is five minutes and an environment where chirping birds—the entire soundtrack—will be welcome. (Note: If you’re not in such an environment presently, exit immediately!)

The film captures our favorite gardening activity, what we call “stumbling.” You gardeners know it well, the transfixed but rather aimless survey of branches, what’s grown overnight, which way which plants are leaning, lapping up shadows, gargling color. How we wish we could see this on the big screen! Menken’s films will show in two batches, 10 of them at 5 pm Saturday, February 17, and 8 more (including Glimpse of the Garden) at 3:30 on Sunday, Feb. 18th. Here’s the complete schedule.

“There is no why for my making films,” she said in a 1966 interview. “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!”

Worth all of it, Marie.