|
|
Notes on Marie Menken
|
What might already be familiar are anecdotes relating to a shining figure of the American underground who was the inspiration for one of Edward Albee's plays. In its search for the complex wife of Willard Maas, Notes on Marie Menken enters unfamiliar terrain. This portrait, subtly constructed from the accounts of contemporaries and forgotten archival material, illuminates a previously underestimated protagonist of New York's avant-garde in fragments. The honest reverence of someone who was younger at the time demonstrates the extent of Marie Menken's attraction. Gerard Malanga, a founding member of the Factory, describes the artist from an adopted son's point of view, and both Jonas Mekas and Stan Brakhage have claimed that she was a central source of aesthetic inspiration. Beginning in the 1940s Menken captured in her filmic glimpses the momentary and the everyday by concentrating on reflections of light, colors, forms and textures. And so she was one of the first to make use of the Bolex camera's temporal elasticity in avant-garde film. A sense of dance-like rhythm, lighting and details is demonstrated in Arabesques for Kenneth Anger in particular, which Kudlácek's homage shows in its entirety. Notes on Marie Menken provides an idea of Menken's highly developed feel for tactile and optical effects by portraying her as a visual artist who concentrated on collage. Her camerawork clear and sensitive, Martina Kudlácek also permits the materiality of the archive and the bodies of eyewitnesses to speak. As a result the Notes on Menken are also inscribed with their own production process: viewing, winding and selection, room for playfulness and doubt.
(Christa Blümlinger)
Notes on Marie Menken explores the almost forgotten story of the legendary artist Marie Menken (1909 - 1970) who became one of New Yorks outstanding underground experimental filmmakers of the Fifties and Sixties, inspiring artists such as Stan Brakhage, Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas, Kenneth Anger, and Gerard Malanga. The documentary allows a glimpse on her social and artistic struggle and radical integrity, drawing the picture of a modern myth in personal diary style.
Marie Menken was an abstract painter when she began to experiment with film. «Film making was a natural evolution while I was engaged in painting, particularly since I was primarily concerned with capturing light, its effect on textured surfaces, its glowing luminescence in the dark, the enhancement of juxtaposed color, persistence of vision and eye fatigue», Marie Menken explains.
The filmmaker Jonas Mekas wrote: «Marie was one of the first filmmakers to improvise with the camera and edit while shooting. She filmed with her entire body, her entire nervous system. You can feel Marie behind every image, how she constructed the film in tiny pieces and through the movement. The movement and the rhythm this is what so many of us seized upon and have developed further in our own work.»
(Production Note)
--> www.notesonmariemenken.org
Printgrafik: MM_sujet_rgb.jpg
print version |
