Menken, Marie (1909–1970)

American filmmaker, artist, and actress . Born in 1909; died in 1970; married Willard Maas (a filmmaker).

Selected filmography:

Visual Variations on Noguchi (1945); Hurry! Hurry! (1957); Faucets (1960); Arabesque for Kenneth Anger (1961); Eye Music in Red Major (1961); Mood Mondrian (1961–63); Go Go Go (1963); Andy Warhol (1965); Drips in Strips (1965); Excursion (1968); Watts with Eggs (1969).

Marie Menken did not begin making movies until she was in her mid-30s, after she purchased a movie camera in a pawn shop. Shortly thereafter, she created her first film, Visual Variations on Noguchi (1945), in which the statues of Isamu Noguchi appeared as if they were in motion through the innovative use of light. Through her almost exclusive use of handheld shots, Menken is credited with freeing the movie camera from the tripod, and her films have been praised for their "love for jolting visual rhythms." Her next film, 1957's Hurry! Hurry!, observes sperm cells through a microscope. In addition to creating "experimental" or "underground" films, Menken was also an abstract artist and painter who exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Married to the filmmaker Willard Maas, she acted in and served as cinematographer on all his films, as well as acting in films by other underground filmmakers. (In 1965, she made a biographical film about Andy Warhol and appeared in his film The Life of Juanita Castro.) Menken preferred to keep her art and her livelihood separate, and throughout her artistic career worked as an editor at the Time-Life corporation. Her last film, Watts with Eggs, was finished a year before her death in 1970.

sources:

Acker, Ally. Reel Women: Pioneers of the Cinema 1896 to the Present. NY: Continuum, 1991.

Grant Eldridge , freelance writer, Pontiac, Michigan