Notes on Marie Menken

Marie Menken saw filmmaking as part of her daily life. Hers was an intimate, gestural cinema of small moments and movements. She improvised with her camera; Kenneth Anger describes her as dancing with it, Jonas Mekas saw her as filming “with her entire body, her entire nervous system.” While central to the avant-garde milieu of the 1940s through the sixties, her films are little known, perhaps in part because of their delicate, unassuming nature, yet she inspired filmmakers including Stan Brakhage and Mekas to understand that cinema could be poetic and personal. This documentary, drawing on Menken's films and on reminiscences by Anger, Brakhage, Mekas, Gerard Malanga, and others, pays tribute to her work and life, which included starring parts in Andy Warhol films and being the inspiration for Martha in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

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