Notes
on Marie Menken
by Martina Kudlacek, Director; John Zorn,
Music
First Run / Icarus Films, Brooklyn NY,
2006
97 mins., col. / b&w
Sales: $398; rental/VHS: $125
Distributor’s website: http://www.frif.com
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens
Department of Art
University of Northern Iowa
Website: http://www.bobolinkbooks.com
ballast@netins.net
So who was Marie Menken (1909-1970)? The
short answer is that she was an experimental
New York-based filmmaker, born in Lithuania,
but ignored until this film came out.
A longer, less interesting answer is that
she earned a living as a clerk on the
graveyard shift at Time Magazine.
She had a volatile marriage, the best
moments of which were weekend drinking
marathons, during which she and her gay
husband would attack each other with alarming
vehemence, despite (or maybe because of)
the presence of houseguests. One of those
guests was the playwright Edward Albee,
and, to this day, Menken’s foremost
claim to fame has been the suspicion that
she and her husband were inspirations
for the characters of Martha and George
in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf? Inadvertently, the
tall and bulky Menken became an underground
movie superstar, when she was featured
in two of Andy Warhol’s films, The
Life of Juanita Castro and The
Chelsea Girls. She knew Warhol not
because she was an actress (she had initially
been a rather awful abstract painter),
but because both she and Warhol had been
goofing around with filmmaking, using
hand-held, spring-driven cameras. There
is a great moment in this film in which
Menken and Warhol are shown in a "dance"
on a rooftop, in which they repeatedly
charge one another, armed with Bolex cameras.
This is a rich, interesting film in certain
ways, but I doubt if its worth can be
credited to the tragedy of Menken’s
life. No doubt her films are significant
as historic artistic excursions, but far
more interesting are the candid, incidental
clips of the circle of various artists
she knew, along with more recent filmed
memories by Jonas Mekas, Peter Kubelka,
Kenneth Anger, Gerard Malanga and others.
(Reprinted by permission from Ballast
Quarterly Review, Volume 21 Number
1, Autumn 2007.)
