Marie Menken - Visual Variations

Marie Menken is a lyrical poet. The structure of Menken's filmic sentences, her movements, and her rhythms are those of poetry. She transposes reality into poetry. It's through poetry that Menken reveals to us the subtle aspects of reality, the mysteries of the world and the mysteries of her own soul. Menken sings. Her lens is focused on the physical world, but she sees it through a poetic temperament and with an intensified sensitivity. She catches the bits and fragments of the world around her and organizes them into aesthetic unities which communicate to us. Her filmic language and her imagery are crisp, clear, wondrous. There are moments in Arabesque and in Notebook that are among the most inspired sentences in filmic poetry.
-Jonas Mekas

Her hand-held camera directly capturing external light shaped into representational images on film is, at the same time, recording her whole body’s reaction to what she is seeing through that camera. She always tended, when taking pictures, to dance and, when editing those film strips, then, to capture the eye’s dance (rather than, say, some idealized stance- dance of the ‘mind’s eye’). She would hang up the strips and film and study the patterns, right, left, up, down, and splice them together as designs in Time—plenty of ideas arising in these arrangements of rhythmic Form, but no superimposed ideology.
-Stan Brakhage

FILMS
1945 Visual Variations on Noguchi 4'
1957 Glimpse of the Garden 5'
1957 Hurry! Hurry! 3'
1959 Dwightiana 3'
1961 Arabesque for Kenneth Anger 4'
1961 Bagatelle for Willard Maas 5'
1961 Eye Music in Red Major 5'
1961 Drips in Strips 3'
1964 Moonplay 5'
1964 Go Go Go 11'
1964 Wrestling 8'
1965 Mood Mondrian 5.5'
1965 Andy Warhol 18'
1966 Lights 6'
1966 Sidewalks 6'
1967 Watts with Eggs 2'
1968 Excursion 5'