Woman with a Movie Camera: Marie Menken’s Visual Variations on Noguchi (1945)

As I watched Marie Menken’s short film, Visual Variations on Noguchi (1945)—screened as part of an exhibit at the Noguchi Museum earlier this year—I found myself thinking about Gertrude Stein. Specifically, I recalled the letter Stein wrote to Samuel Steward in 1940, thanking him for a gift he had sent her and Alice B. Toklas: a countertop stand mixer known as the Sunbeam Mix Master 500. “The Mix master came Easter Sunday, and we have not had time to more than read the literature and put it together and gloat, oh so beautiful is the Mix master, so beautiful,” Stein writes. “[W]e are very happy to have it here, bless you Sammy. . . . Alice all smiles and murmurs in her dreams, Mix master.”[1]

In subsequent letters, Stein returns to the Mix Master, writing small encomiums to its infinite capacities (“Day and night Mix master is a delight”) as if she were composing ad copy for a woman’s home journal.[2] Months later, when she and Toklas accidentally break the appliance’s green bowl, she begs Steward for another, since “you see you can use other bowls but they do not twirl around in that lovely green mix master way.”[3]

Menken composed her four-minute film a few years after Stein’s thank you letter. A painter turned experimental filmmaker, Menken conveys in her first short the same joy in circularity and rhythmic movement: the evident pleasure she took in twirling around the studio of artist Isamu Noguchi, cranking her small, hand-held Bolex camera. Those movements are echoed, in turn, by the circling of celluloid through the 16mm projector—“the twitters of the machine,” as Menken described it.[4] This sound was particularly audible within the intimate space of the museum, where Visual Variations was exhibited alongside several other examples of her cinema (fig. 1).

Visual Variations consists of a series of shots: swoops, swirls, pendulum-like swings, and oil rig-like thrusts of the apparatus, a montage that poetically evokes rather than directly portrays Noguchi’s substantial sculptures. Watching the gyrations and perambulations of Menken’s camera, it is easy to register in its movements a Stein-like delight in the discovery of a new and only seemingly repetitive expressive language, one echoed in her recursive writing about the filmmaking process. “While I was experimenting around I had the advantage of looking around Isamu’s studio with a clear unobstructed eye. I asked if I might come in and shoot around, and he said yes,” Menken told P. Adams Sitney in a 1962 interview.[5] In an earlier brochure, describing the musique concrète soundtrack that her friend Lucille Dlugozewski added to the film in 1953, Menken wrote that “[m]y camera and I took a turn about Noguchi’s studio and the camera-eye recorded the happy journey and when Lucille saw what the camera had seen she took a happy journey and together it is all happiness.”[6] It’s a line that, in its stylized iterations and ingenuousness, might come straight from one of Stein’s letters. As the filmmaker Stan Brakhage himself would later write, discerning the aesthetic affinity between the two artists, “Marie often seems to be repetitive but, like Stein, she never is” (Film at Wit’s End, 40).  

Menken’s first film, Visual Variations exemplifies what Sitney referred to as her “somatic approach to camera movement,” the exploratory hand-held cinematography that is now considered a hallmark of her cinema.[7] The result of Menken’s “journey” around Noguchi’s abstract sculptures—some standing, slab-like, on the floor; others suspended, like stalactites, from the ceiling—is not a portrait of his work so much as an interpretive rendering of what Noguchi himself called its “imminent motion,” and what Menken called “the flying spirit of movement within these solid objects” (qtd. in Weiner, A Glorious Bewilderment; qtd. in Brakhage, Film at Wit’s End, 38). Menken would later acknowledge that the appeal of filmmaking for her lay precisely in the medium’s capacity to capture dynamism: “In painting I never liked the staid static, always looked for what would change with source of light and stance” (qtd. in Sitney, Eyes Upside Down, 10). Menken, then, seems to have not just shared but transmuted into her cinema the same “epistemic fantasies” that, Daniel Morgan argues, have historically attached to the moving camera: that it can “[function] as our surrogate, our mode of access to the world,” and more specifically, that it might “match our own forms of movement.”[8]

The exhibit’s title, “A Glorious Bewilderment,” reflects Menken’s modernist commitment to defamiliarization, accomplished not only through her camera’s unexpected movements but by her approach to framing and editing. Following Visual Variations’ brief opening credits, for instance, the camera pans down from a smooth white stone shape to what appears to be a piece of wood affixed to a wheel; Menken then cuts to an even closer view of the spokes from a different angle, then an extreme close-up of the wood grain (fig. 2). This sequence of images conveys in miniature Menken’s non-representational and playfully anti-expository agenda. (In this sense, Menken’s cinematic practice might be understood within the broader tradition of “asemic writing” that Natalie Ferris describes in her discussion of poet and artist Ana Hatherly.) The exhibit catalog usefully identifies some of the sculptures included in the film, but the images themselves betray little identifying information. Curator Kate Weiner concisely sums up the experience in her accompanying text: “As we move with Menken, it is difficult to get our bearings. She denies the viewer any establishing shots, or wide-angle views of the space in its entirety, and we never have the opportunity to ‘step back’ to catch a fixed overall view of any individual work” (A Glorious Bewilderment).

The result is at once discombobulating and immensely suggestive; the abstraction and only partial legibility of Menken’s images invites viewers’ inferencing and engagement in discerning what, and from what angle, we are seeing. A similar sense of play animates other of Menken’s short films, including those featured in the exhibit. Moon Play (1964–66), scored by Maya Deren’s collaborator and partner Teiji Ito, features specifically lunar play: shots of a mostly full moon, from different angles, obscured to varying extents, appearing to bounce around the frame. Hurry, Hurry! (1957) meanwhile, offers a cheeky take on the drama of human sexual reproduction, giving viewers a super-magnified glimpse of spermatozoa engaged in a frantic and futile ballet. They jitter and vibrate, all soundlessness and fury, fertilizing nothing (fig. 3).

By invoking modernism in general, and Stein in particular, to frame my reflections on the exhibit, I don’t mean to continue the tradition of approaching Menken through the lens of her better-known peers and collaborators, including Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, and Stan Brakhage. The latter in particular has become closely associated with Menken, thanks to his incisive and deeply appreciative commentary on her filmmaking. In a chapter from Film at Wit’s End, Brakhage credits Menken’s hand-held cinematography with nothing less than shaping the field of experimental media-making:

Visual Variations on Noguchi liberated a lot of independent filmmakers from the idea that had been so powerful up to then, that we have to imitate the Hollywood dolly shot, without dollies—that the smooth pan and dolly was the only acceptable thing. Marie’s free, swinging, swooping hand-held pans changed all that, for me and for the whole independent filmmaking world. (38)

Despite this legacy, however, and the respect Menken enjoyed as a painter during her lifetime, she never attained prominence as a filmmaker. “By the end of the 1950s,” Sitney writes, “her reputation among filmmakers was split between those who cited her as the height of inept fumbling and amateurishness and those for whom her style was revolutionary and a liberating influence” (Eyes Upside Down, 23). The accusation of amateurism, of course, is not gender-neutral. As Alix Beeston has argued in an essay for Visualities, the claim that images lack technical “quality” or “sharpness” is one that has frequently been deployed to diminish women’s art.

Later in the twentieth century, thanks in large part to Jonas Mekas’s championing of her cinema in a 1962 Village Voice review, Menken’s “liberating influence” was more widely acknowledged. Yet even to date—and perhaps unsurprisingly, given the politics of film historiography—Menken has not enjoyed a degree of visibility commensurate to her artistic significance. Although I had heard her name, the Noguchi Museum exhibit marked the first time that I had the chance to actually see many of her films, which remain difficult to watch, other than via a hard-to-procure DVD compilation or rental through the The Film-Makers' Cooperative.

Nevertheless, Menken was a major presence in the post-war New York arts scene. She met Noguchi while collaborating with him on a ballet choreographed by Merce Cunningham and scored by John Cage, provided the “schema” for Maya Deren’s A Study in Choreography, appeared in an Andy Warhol screen test, Marie Menken (1966), and then starred in Warhol’s film Bitch (1965) alongside her husband Willard Maas. (Rumor has it that she also taught Warhol to use a camera.) Menken and Maas had already inspired Edward Albee’s play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), and, in turn, Mike Nichols’s film of the same name. Both their marital dysfunction and enduring bohemianism had long been on display at the extravagant parties the couple threw in their penthouse apartment at 62 Montague Street, which attracted guests including Charles Addams, Marilyn Monroe, Truman Capote, and Richard Wright (Brakhage, Film at Wit’s End, 35–36). In June, I walked by the building, trying to envision this perch in the wealthy enclave of Brooklyn Heights as the site of both artistic foment and debauchery (fig. 4).

The breadth of Menken’s creative activity would seem to justify my critical inclination to consider her work within its broader cultural and trans-historical contexts. But even before learning about Menken’s wide-ranging collaborations, I felt drawn to make more far-flung comparisons—to position Visual Variations in relation to Stein’s writing rather than (or as well as) Noguchi’s art, its ostensive subject, or to the New York filmmakers it would influence. It feels just as easy to put Visual Variations into conversation with Surrealist and Dada films that came before it—Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy’s Ballet Méchanique (1924) or Viking Eggeling’s Symphonie Diagonale (1924)—as the experimental films that came after.

In fact, one of the most fascinating moments of the exhibit explicitly invited attendees to speculate about such broader patterns of affinity: to imagine for Menken’s work other possible intellectual and creative lineages. Describing the intermittently intelligible soundtrack Dlugoszewski created for Visual Variations, curator Kate Weiner notes that we hear recited the names Marguerite, Ida, Helena, and Annabel: “the names of the unstable and shifting heroine(s) in Gertrude Stein’s play Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights (1938).” For Weiner, Stein’s play, which Dlugoszewski might feasibly have seen during its brief 1951 run at New York’s The Living Theater, emerges as an important intertext. It communicates a preoccupation shared by Noguchi, Menken, and Stein around the existential threats posed by emerging technologies, readily bent to destructive purposes. The allusion, in Weiner’s words, suggests the degree to which all three were “reckoning with the metaphoric weight of artificial light—its beauty and horror—in the dawn of the atomic age: the consequence of ‘lighting the lights.’”

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Watching Menken’s astonishing, vividly original shorts, I began to wonder what it meant to encounter her art in a space devoted to the celebration of another’s. How did experiencing Menken’s work as both literally and figuratively adjacent to a male contemporary’s affect my engagement with it? I was similarly aware of the asymmetrical relations between the objects on display: the flickering ephemerality and comparative slightness of the films contrasted with the impermeability and elegance of Noguchi’s sculptures. If in Visual Variations we see Noguchi’s work through Menken’s lens, this exhibit also asked viewers, figuratively at least, to see her work through his.

Such questions gain urgency given what I learned about Menken’s own self-deprecating stance toward her cinema. For Brakhage, at least, this was Menken’s way of preempting critical disregard: “Marie knew perfectly well who and what she was, but her way of dealing with the inattention was to treat her own works more lightly than they should have been treated” (Film at Wit’s End, 46–47). If the result, Brakhage argues, was ultimately salutary for Menken—allowing her to actually be, rather than pose, as an artist—it’s a sadly familiar story: a story about women learning to take their art less seriously.

It was somewhat auspicious, then, that my visit to the museum ended with a reminder in the other direction—about how fungible critical judgements and interpretive contexts might be. As I walked up to Noguchi’s Lunar Lamp Prototype from 1951, I overheard one museumgoer say to her friend, “If I passed this lamp in a free pile in the street, I might leave it behind.” Later, circling back, she returned to the theme. “It doesn’t look that lunar to me,” she said. “To me, it’s a tomato cage.”

The visitor’s proposed transmutation of fine art into functional object—or even sidewalk trash—feels like a fascinating reversal of Duchamp’s urinal gambit, and intimates that only context is responsible for elevating the otherwise “underwhelming” (another descriptor I overheard). But these comments also suggest how easily we—as audiences, as viewers—make our own contexts. Writing of the exhibit, a reviewer for The New York Times felt it was Noguchi who suffered by comparison with Menken, suggesting that his “gorgeous sculptures, seen fully in the round but entirely static, might look a little bit thin.” Coming to the museum for Menken, I couldn’t help but feel that her films—positioned, however flatteringly, as an adjunct—also deserve to be the main event.