Marie Menken was an American avant-garde filmmaker and painter. She was also an exceptionally influential figure with many of the major underground filmmakers of the 1950s and '60s. She passed away on December 29, 1970.
Born in 1910 in Brooklyn, New York, Menken studied at the New York School of Fine and Industrial Arts and at the Art Students League. She began her artistic career as a painter, then made her first avant-garde film in 1945. Visual Variations on Noguchi was filmed with a hand-cranked Bolex 16mm camera and Menken was instantly celebrated for her intuitive, free-form cinematic style.
However, Menken did not finish another film until 1957's Hurry! Hurry!, after which she became quite prolific with her filmmaking. Her style primarily bounced between single-frame documentaries, like the acclaimed Go! Go! Go!; and her portraits of other artists and filmmakers, like Kenneth Anger and Andy Warhol.
Menken also earned a reputation as an influential, muse-like figure to many of the underground filmmakers of the 1960s. In 1962, she and her husband Willard Maas let L.A. filmmaker Kenneth Anger live with them in Brooklyn, during which time Anger would film the motorcycle gang featured in his masterpiece Scorpio Rising. Menken also collaborated with other filmmakers, such as by animating the chess sequence in Maya Deren's At Land; and serving as cinematographer on Maas's classic Geography of the Body. She also acted in films, such as Dov Lederberg's Eargogh and in Andy Warhol's The Life of Juanita Castro.
