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So, Really Good In Theory was plenty fun, particularly the market stalls during the daytime. Rifling through parts of someone’s record collection, being sold off to occasion an interstate move, felt oddly melancholic - much like a similar recent experience, when one of the English department’s senior members retired and left her book collection to be pillaged by postgraduates and fellow staff - though it did turn up among other gems a Wipers album, which almost made my day. The biggest revelation, though, was turning up a copy of Stan Brakhage’s Film At Wit’s End for a few dollars.

I’d definitely read parts of the book before, as I instantly remembered the fantastic photo of Ken Jacobs, caught mid-rant, hand grasping the air and eyes lit with energy, that faces the opening page of Brakhage’s discussion of the singular New York filmmaker. I must have photocopied it for my Honours thesis, back in the day. But it was Brakhage’s reminiscences of filmmaker and artist Marie Menken, her slight but impressive body of work, and her marriage to gay filmmaker Willard Maas, that took me by surprise.



It was timely, too, as I’d recently been loaned a copy of Kino’s Avant-Garde 2: Experimental Cinema 1928-1954 double DVD, which features Maas’s 1943 film Geography Of The Body, filmed by Menken, and her own Visual Variations On Noguchi, from 1945. If the former is beautiful for its slow caress of the male and female body, hovering somewhere between anatomical overview and erotic languor, particularly as the bodies filmed slowly pulse and rest with breath, Visual Variations On Noguchi is a different beast: freewheeling where Maas’s film is slow, yet no less considered in its approach.

Brakhage writes that Visual Variations On Noguchi was groundbreaking for its freely physical, improvisatory use of hand-held camera, and it’s still dizzying to watch. As a translation, or interpretation, of Isamu Noguchi’s sculpture, it’s dazzling, and Menken keys into the rhythm of sculpture, the almost corporeal tactility of the form as expressed by Noguchi. I’d not thought of it before, but Brakhage is right when he argues Menken’s first film unshackled underground and experimental cinema from imperatives learnt from Hollywood (i.e. the dolly shot); in her unassuming way, Menken thus appears the one of the key liberating figures of American underground cinema.



Menken’s physical response to vision, the rhythm in her films, also informs my favourite of her works, her Notebook. I had the honour of screening Notebook back in 2003, and (confession time) have lifted countless stills from it for record covers and so on over the past five years. I’m particularly drawn to the ‘Night Writing’ section of the film, featuring neon lights that dance and curl against darkness; as P Adams Sitney describes it, the lights are “filmed with such quick movement that they appear to be brilliant calligraphy on the screen”. Sitney also notes the importance of Notebook on Brakhage’s breakthrough film Anticipation Of The Night. (I’m going to have to go back and watch it again, evidently.) While Notebook is far from the first underground film to deal in relatively ‘pure’ visual phenomenon, Menken’s approach is particularly revelatory, and beautiful: whether ‘calligraphising’ static neon lights, making the moon move and leap about in the night sky, recording rain hitting a pool, or documenting an Easter procession such that only the church lights and candle lights are visible, in some ways this film erases the human from (what’s in) the frame: it’s about natural phenomena, or ‘manmade’ phenomena that, through Menken’s lens, takes on the energy and vibrancy of (her interpretation of) nature. For me it works as an important metaphor for art based on phenomena rather than romanticism, and yet these are visually rich, gorgeous, stunning films. For some reason, this also makes me think of Mike Barnes’s Invisible Jukebox with Broadcast, where both Barnes and the group marvel at the seemingly unintentional affective properties of examples of functional audio, like library music.

Brakhage’s discussion of Maas and Menken’s complicated relationship is rather more prosaic: Menken stayed devoted to Maas to the very end, through his string of gay lovers, and they lived together until their death in 1970 - Menken drinking herself to death, Maas passing away four days later. Throughout the chapter on Menken, Brakhage had been tiptoeing, maintaining a respectful if sometimes fraught balance between his respect for Maas and what feels like a kind of despair at Maas’s relationship with and treatment of Menken, singling out Maas’s constant belittlement of Menken’s films. But it’s in the last sentence that Brakhage cuts loose. Speaking of the closeness in timing of their respective deaths, he grunts, “It was probably the only romantic thing [Maas] ever did in his relationship with Marie Menken.”