A quotation from Aristophanes, "The desire and pursuit of the whole is called love," precedes views of a man and a woman's bodies, often in extreme close up. Off-screen, a voice recites fragments of oracular literature and purple prose. We see an eye, an ear, a mouth, a tongue, bits of hair, a...
"By 1967, Menken had become interested in the work of Fluxus artist Robert Watts and made a short animation piece, Watts with EGGS, in which she animates his chrome-casted Box of Eggs. The film opens with lights reflected in the eggs (of course), then, through single framing, pixilates a man's hand...
"This is a new version of the now famous film made for her husband, the poet and film-maker. Returning from the Brussels fair, she shot this at Versailles and the Louvre. There is wit, irony and prophecy here (though perhaps not apparent to those who do not know Marie Menken and Willard Maas...
Filmed at the Alhambra in Spain in just one day, according to Marie Menken. Arabesque for Kenneth Anger concentrates on visual details found in Moorish architecture and in ancient Spanish tile. The date 1961 refers to the addition of Teiji Ito's soundtrack and its subsequent completion, but the...
A young male protagonist dreams of a muscleman hero, a black dancer, and a princess who gives him a magic urn. When he wakes he rejects his mother (Menken) and wanders the cold streets, where he finds his dream characters corrupted or dying.
A voice occasionally says a word or two: "on the sidewalk" or "lithium" or a woman's name. A hand-held camera frames parts of sculptures, or moves across their surfaces, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, almost always in close-up. The soundtrack, in addition to the voice, is discordant music....
Menken's 16mm, stop-motion tribute to the art of Dwight Ripley was filmed in 1959 in his apartment at 416 East Fifty-eighth Street in New York. She used his drawings as flats.The remarkably contemporary soundtrack for steel drum, guitar, flute, and voice was written for the occasion by Maya Deren's...
