Notes On Marie Menken

Austrian documentarian Martina Kudlacek's follow-up to IN THE MIRROR OF MAYA DEREN (2003) pays tribute to another pioneering experimental filmmaker, Marie Menken. Both began making films in the 1940s and cast powerful shadows over the American avant-garde. But though Menken continued working through the 1960s, bridging post-war abstract painting and pop art through her relationships with Gerard Malanga and Andy Warhol, she remains less well known than Deren.

Menken, universally described by her friends as a tall, imposing woman with a gentle soul, began her career as a painter and collagist (her highly textured, decorative canvases are given polite short shr...