Lights

United States

1966

7 Min

Color

Silent

Currently 4.0/5 Stars.
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DIR Marie Menken

Synopsis

Marie Menken’s Lights is a film of such joy, such pure sensual beauty, that it is breathtaking and overwhelming. In just seven minutes, with a breakneck sequence of abstract, colorful images of lights floating in a black nighttime field, Menken delivers an intoxicating visual experience. It’s an abstracted vision, like the work of Stan Brakhage, a celebration of light and color in which each frame is alive with furious scribbles of blurred light and tangled rainbow beams. It’s as though Menken is drawing with light by shaking her camera, unleashing small hash marks of white light and amber curlicues that twist around each other. Through Menken’s expressive stylization, the marks and lines of these lights become a form of handwriting, an abstract language inscribed in the twists and turns of motion-blurred neon, car brake lights and Christmas decorations. The film was assembled over the course of three years, during which Menken shot Christmas window displays and other seasonal decorations, working mostly late in the night, when she could be alone in the darkness with these vibrant beacons.

Director

Marie Menken

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… read more

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Răpciune

1Jun11

after the stark monochromy i've been (willingly) going through recently, this gorgeous splash of violently colored confetti feels like a joyous plunge into a lysergic dream. a sparkling fantasy, champagne for the eyes, like an immensely fragmented Gabriele Münter painting.