Arabesque for Kenneth Anger

Marie Menkevicius (25 May 1909 in New York City, New York – 29 December 1970) was an American experimental filmmaker and socialite.

The daughter of Catholic-Lithuanian immigrants, she grew up in Brooklyn. In 1931 she met and married Willard Maas, a professor of literature at Wagner College in Staten Island. It was a rocky and unstable marriage.

Maas, a verbally abusive husband who was jealous of Marie’s popularity and acceptance as an artist, as his own was in decline, has also been identified by Gerard Malanga to have been the off-camera presence performing fellatio on DeVeren Bookwalter in the 1964 Andy Warhol experimental film Blow Job, although a different version of this (thought by many to be unreliable) appears in the 1980 Warhol memoir Popism: The Warhol Sixties.

The strongest bond that held Maas and Menken together (besides their friends in common) was their “wild parties”, and “wild fights”, fortified by the consumption of drugs washed down by distilled spirits.

Friend Edward Albee based the characters of Martha and George and their relationship on Menken and Maas in his play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962).

Menken appeared in Andy Warhol’s films Chelsea Girls and “The Life of Juanita Castro” (1965)

She was the basis of the 2006 documentary film Notes on Marie Menken by Martina Kudlacek. The film featured Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Gerard Malanga, Jonas Mekas, and Marie’s nephew, Joseph J. Menkevich.

In 2007, Menken’s Glimpse of the Garden (1957) was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. —Wikipedia