Marie Menken

Lacking a formal narrative, Warhol's mammoth film follows various residents of the Chelsea Hotel in 1966 New York City. The film was intended to be screened via dual projector set-up.

Also known as Walden, Jonas Mekas’s first diary film is a six-reel chronicle of his life in 1960s New York, interweaving moments with family, friends, lovers, and artistic idols. Blending everyday encounters with portraits of the avant-garde art scene, it forms an epic, personal meditation on community, creativity, and the passage of time.

A quotation from Aristophanes, "The desire and pursuit of the whole is called love," precedes views of a man and a woman's bodies, often in extreme close up. Off-screen, a voice recites fragments of oracular literature and purple prose. We see an eye, an ear, a mouth, a tongue, bits of hair, a hand, the tips of fingers, toes. Occasionally, the frame includes a larger scape of a body: a chest, a back, a breast. Usually the camera is stationery; sometimes, it moves across a body, remaining in close up. They hold hands for one moment. The bodies are without clothes; no genitalia are visible.

The films were made between 1964 and 1966 at Warhol's Factory studio in New York City. Subjects were captured in stark relief by a strong key light, and filmed by Warhol with his stationary 16mm Bolex camera on silent, black and white, 100-foot rolls of film at 24 frames per second. The resulting two-and-a-half-minute film reels were then screened in 'slow motion' at 16 frames per second.

Experimental film showing film clips of a garden, with birds chirping for the soundtrack.

In 1963 Boultenhouse wrote, produced, and directed Dionysius,which he described as a “free treatment of Euripides' The Bacchae.”It starred the dancers Louis Falco, Anna Duncan, and Nicolas Magallanes as Dionysius, Agave, and Pentheus respectively, and the experimental filmmakers Charles Levine, Willard Maas, Gregory Markopoulos, Marie Menken, Lloyd Williams and William Wood as the Chorus of Cameras. The film's score was by Teiji Ito.

A playwright taunts a number of actors into improvising a truly ridiculous but subtlely meaningful meditation on Fidel Castro and his family.

Andy Warhol is a lyrical exploration of Warhol's creative process by filmmaker, painter, and actress Marie Menken. Using a hand-held camera, Menken captures Warhol and his assistants, including Gerard Malanga, as they work at the Factory. The result is an intimate portrait of the artist in the process of creating some of his most famous works, including the Brillo boxes, the Jackie series, and the Flowers silkscreens.

A film poem, a re-telling of the Greek myth in modern terms. In the traditional pool the water has become muddy and Narcissus finds that mirrors are more rewarding for the study of his changing reflections. There are three mirrors, each reflecting a dramatic study in self-love. The first, love that deserves the adoration of the opposite sex; the second, homosexual love that investigates itself and its own sex; the third, love that insures one a place in the present and history.

In the Search of the Miraculous is a multi-levelled story realized with extremely personal techniques and with the kind of atmosphere of Poetry and Introspection, only a poet could create. It is, in fact, the story of a poet searching himself through his love for a girl, and of the girl searching for her father. Obsequious to the iron rules of the avant-garde, the film has neither a beginning nor an ending it is a series of moods, it is a search which is at the same time spiritual and concrete, it is a moment in the life of two people. (Donatella Manganotti)

“Andy Warhol called Marie Menken and Willard Maas ‘the last of the great bohemians,’ and, in 1965, made Bitch, his real-life parody of Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, with Willard and Marie sitting on the couch in their living room, drunk and arguing on a Sunday afternoon. Unscripted, shot with a stationary camera in his signature home-movie documentary style, Warhol’s Bitch has never before been seen by the public—until now…” (Philip Gefter).

Filmed at the Alhambra in Spain in just one day, according to Marie Menken. Arabesque for Kenneth Anger concentrates on visual details found in Moorish architecture and in ancient Spanish tile. The date 1961 refers to the addition of Teiji Ito's soundtrack and its subsequent completion, but the film was likely shot in 1960 or earlier. - David Lewis

Inspired by Bibbe Hansen's experiences in a juvenile detention center.

A young male protagonist dreams of a muscleman hero, a black dancer, and a princess who gives him a magic urn. When he wakes he rejects his mother (Menken) and wanders the cold streets, where he finds his dream characters corrupted or dying.

"By 1967, Menken had become interested in the work of Fluxus artist Robert Watts and made a short animation piece, Watts with EGGS, in which she animates his chrome-casted Box of Eggs. The film opens with lights reflected in the eggs (of course), then, through single framing, pixilates a man's hand arranging eggs in different patterns. The hands (those of John Hawkins) fill the box back up with eggs. Next, the eggs do the same routine, but more magically, more serenely, without the assistance of the hands. Menken also introduces a string and a feather duster into animated action, so that the eggs, one by one, seem to be coming directly out of the duster (objects infect objects). By the end, the eggs are magically back in their box." Melissa Ragona

A short, diaristic film; A series of impressions, animations and playful vignettes in color and B&W. Early/ Outtake footage of Menken's Lights can be seen here, as well as camera techniques she'd expand upon in later films.

A look at avant-garde filmmaker Marie Menken.

Various forms of everyday motion in and around a city are shown at rapid speed.

A boat trip with friends round Manhattan, shot in single-frame mode

A voice occasionally says a word or two: "on the sidewalk" or "lithium" or a woman's name. A hand-held camera frames parts of sculptures, or moves across their surfaces, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, almost always in close-up. The soundtrack, in addition to the voice, is discordant music. Light and shadows are paramount. Sometimes the camera repeats up and down movements; once, a set of jump cuts brings an object closer. The music can be shrill in contrast to the sculptures. Almost entirely of wood, they are the work of Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988): Abstract, usually smooth and rounded (but not always).