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