The One Great Advantage Which All Professionals Envy: Amateur Freedom

The post-war American avant-garde was largely an evolution of the country’s robust amateur cinema – a connection made frequently and vocally by the filmmakers themselves. In the 1930s and 1940s, amateur discourse encouraged experimentation. Professionalism, Jan-Christopher Horak notes, “was equated with commercialism, while amateurism connoted artistic integrity”; foreshadowing the post-war avant-garde, the amateur movement “[identified] personal expression with formal experimentation.”⁶ Charles Tepperman similarly notes that the freedom from commercial concerns encouraged amateur filmmakers’ explorations of “aesthetic discoveries,” and the discourse reflected not just that freedom, but the possibility that artistically-inclined amateurs might indeed have a duty to experiment with poetic forms (even if the experimental only represented a small portion of the overall footage taken by non-professionals).⁷

Deren was among the most eloquent and fervent voices calling for amateur experimentation, noting that “the amateur should make use of the one great advantage which all professionals envy him, namely, freedom.” As Tepperman and Zimmerman both demonstrate, amateur discourse may have encouraged experimentation and non-traditional, “poetic” approaches to filmic expression, but technical proficiency was at the forefront of all discussions of aspiration and accomplishment in the amateur world.⁸ This becomes important in part because there was a hierarchy within the amateur world: amateur film vs “home movies.” The amateur was an artist who was not restricted by the demands of the commercial industry, and who was therefore free – some would say obligated – to experiment and develop a new, poetic language of cinema. But for someone to be taken seriously as an amateur filmmaker, whether they were making fairly straightforward travelogues, short narratives, or film poems, required careful, steady compositions, clear and legible editing, and proper lighting and focus. The amateurs needed to distinguish themselves from their less-discerning non-professional cousins lest their work be ignored entirely.

Marie Menken, however, made home movies. There was no effort on Menken’s part to justify or rationalize her divergence from mainstream narrative style and techniques, no attempt to obscure a functionally nonexistent budget with an alternative set of technical proficiencies. Deren celebrated the uniquely liberatory possibilities of amateurism, but her ethic was highly professional: expertly choreographed deployment of the camera; precise lighting and focus; carefully planned, meticulous mise-en-scène; complex, intricate screenplays. Menken, by contrast, pointed her shaky, often blurry camera at parties, tourist spots, parks: the subjects of films typically projected on a bed sheet for friends and relatives as opposed to the sort made by the aspirational amateur who subscribed to Movie Makers or, of course, American Cinematographer. Her films are structured by and around playful engagement with subjects, and with the camera. They tend not to have legible arcs or narrative shapes – and certainly no pre-planned scenarios. They are freely inventive and apparently light, especially compared to the dense, symbol-laden narratives of Deren. And, for all her remarkable virtuosity, Menken’s cinematography habitually violates established “rules” – or, rather, her films seem not to acknowledge anything resembling the guidelines of proper filmmaking technique.⁹ Images are often out of focus, the lighting is “bad,” and the camera is very, very shaky. As Sitney notes, “by the end of the 1950s her reputation among filmmakers was split between those who cited her as the height of inept fumbling and amateurishness and those for whom her style was revolutionary and a liberating influence.”¹⁰

The liberatory quality of Menken’s work extends beyond her camerawork to the dissolution of the boundaries: between live action and animation, and, in some sense, between mediums.¹¹ As Melissa Ragona notes, Menken’s work in animation extends directly from her gallery practice, sometimes in very literal ways realizing animated versions of styles first employed on canvas. ¹² For Ragona, Menken’s primary concern was “ungrounding the easel-based practices of drawing and sculpture through film.”¹³ This, of course, complicates the comparatively simple account of Menken’s gestural cinematography, which, as Juan A. Suarez points out “at times bypasses the body completely, creating perceptions that could only be technologically generated.”¹⁴ But it also, for Ragona, complicates the Brakhage- and Mekas-inspired readings of Menken’s work in abstract expressionist terms, especially those concerns associated with medium-specificity. Contra Brakhage’s abstract expressionist turn, Ragona argues “perception, not paint, became medium.”¹⁵ As she argues, Menken’s critique of medium specificity was inscribed into her camerawork, her handheld camera creating “a frenetic vertigo on sculptural, architectural, natural, and domestic objects,”¹⁶ language that suggests a somewhat oppositional perspective. That is, Menken’s movement – uninhibited, spontaneous, and subtle – offers an alternative to the “verticality and stasis” of her subjects.

It is difficult to reduce Menken’s incredibly rich and fiercely inventive filmography to singular principles, and Ragona’s contribution has expanded and complicated our understandings of Menken as an artist-filmmaker while offering brilliant – and necessary – feminist correctives to the largely masculinist interpretations of her work. But I do want to suggest a dominant through-line to Menken’s work, though it is not the Brakhage model that Ragona so aptly critiques. In particular, I’d like to posit animation as a central aesthetic principle throughout Menken’s career, a sort of paradoxical key to her handheld cinematography. More specifically, Menken is concerned with creating movement, with animating. She pursues this end through a broad range of style and techniques: from stop-motion in Watts with Eggs to the pixilation-like effects in Go! Go! Go! (1964), from energetic handheld camera movement “animating” paintings, sculptures, and architecture in Visual Variations on Noguchi and Arabesque for Kennet Anger to the way Drips in Strips (1961) engages the movement of a static artwork through footage of dripping paint.

Squiggles and Scribbles: Lights

Menken’s films frequently merge animation (or animation-adjacent practices) with her own hyper-shaky style of handheld camerawork. Perhaps the most perfect merger comes with her film Lights (1966). Lights begins with images that resemble countless home movies projected in suburban living rooms in the 1950s and 1960s: close-ups of a giant, colorfully decorated Christmas tree, just outside a church in New York City. The stunning opening of the film turns the photographic into abstract animation, into visual music, and, by alternating between relatively more stationary, more identifiable images and abstract shapes and squiggles that jump across the screen. Menken shows how she achieves the transformation: by moving the camera – twisting, turning, and wildly shaking it – the tree lights become ecstatic patterns of colors. At the start of the opening sequence, the camera moves (comparatively) slowly over the lights, exploring the evolving composition of colors and shadings. And then it begins to swing back and forth, and up and down, shaky and blurry but remaining controlled and concrete compared to the effects she will achieve later in the film.

The opening of the following section, in which Menken films the tree and the surrounding areas in long shot, neatly encapsulates the film’s aesthetic, poised on the edge of photography and animation. Filming at night, with only the lights visible, the tree is viewed in full for the first time, filmed from below. In a brief, 2-second shot, the tree floats and spins around the perimeter of the frame. Menken is obviously the one moving here, pirouetting at the base of the tree, but it’s the tree that appears to dance. We could read this as Menken’s camera bouncing and twisting in response to the lights in front of her, an exploration of the scene in front of her. Or we could understand it as Menken making the tree dance, the stationary subject brought to life through Menken’s shaky, out of focus, poorly lit handheld camerawork.

This is far from the subjective, expressionist mantras of Brakhage and Mekas. Menken doesn’t exactly use the camera to express or index her state of mind, but uses her handheld camerawork playfully to transform what’s in front of her. The camera movement does not record her impressions of the tree – it may be expressive, even expressionist, but it is far more concerned with using the tree for the creation of new images that are distinct from the profilmic reality. Like Deren, Menken uses the camera’s capacity for distortion to create forms of movement that could not otherwise exist. And, also like Deren, Menken alters the speed of the camera, abstracting the lights and shapes onscreen enough that the “film dance” is constantly teasing the possibility of coming unmoored from its photographic referent. But she pushes the image much further into pure abstraction than Deren ever would. Indeed, we might even start to bridge the gap between the extreme of photographic abstractions of Lights and the direct animations of Brakhage, in which he scratched, painted, and taped objects directly onto film strips. Yet that might go too far. Menken herself seems to think it is important for the viewer to recognize the profilmic referent, emphasizing the connection between the lights as identifiable, physical objects and the abstract images she creates and animates with the shakes and jumps of her handheld camera: anything that Menken films come to life.

As the film progresses, Menken drastically ups the level of abstraction. Undercranking the camera to exaggerate the shake of the image further, Menken films the church, whose structure is outlined in glowing white Christmas lights – which are, in the low-light photography, the only objects visible in the otherwise dark frame. The lights twist in a circle, the image growing even more unstable as the scene cuts to close shots. As Menken’s camera moves up and down the strings of lights, the shapes seem to break down into their individual bulbs. For the first time, the film then includes visible images of the other decorations in front of the church: angels, a nativity scene, all photographed in this jumpy, quasi-pixilated style of low-speed photography. But, even with the shakiness, the film once again resolves into photographic referentiality and fleeting stability before transitioning to the most radical abstraction of the film.

Halfway through the 6-minute film, Menken for the first time wanders from her initial subjects to film a broader nightscape of lights: car taillights, streetlamps, buildings in the distance. As the low-speed camera jumps around the nightscape, cars zoom by. During this sequence, Menken moves along gradations of abstraction through whip pans and varying focuses, including shots of traffic that abstract into a jumble of stunning curlicues scrawled across the screen, the white and red lines of headlights and taillights zig-zagging into diagonals that quickly seem to diverge from the original referent.

Menken demonstrates precisely how such a seemingly magical effect can be achieved: beginning with more recognizably photographic images, the camera shakes with increasing vigor until the image explodes into astonishing bursts of color, as if an illustrator was furiously scribbling directly onto the screen. In doing so, Menken shows off her unique investment in demystification and demonstration: she provides extraordinary, delightful, unprecedented images, but she also reveals and essentially explains how she makes them. Her films are not showcases of her own mastery, but demonstrations of easily replicable techniques for bringing images to life, for transforming nighttime traffic into visual music, for creating an animated city symphony out of whatever sights you happen to stumble across.

In this sense, Lights is typical of Menken’s filmography. We see this emphasis on demonstration, for example, in Menken’s more traditionally animated film Watts with Eggs, a film in which she runs through a stop-motion routine featuring silver eggs from a Robert Watts sculpture, moving in circles, dancing around. The first time the eggs “perform” their routine, a hand is present in the image, pixilated; the second time, the hand is absent. The film first shows how the eggs move, then shows how the effects are achieved. Watts with Eggs, like Lights, does not just want to show you playful, novel images; it wants to show how they are made. The delight in these films comes in no small part from the demonstration. In Lights, the final minute-plus of the film repeats its demonstration with variations, returning to several of the tableaux from earlier in the film. This final section is an unspeakably ecstatic eruption of light and color, but Menken grounds its transcendent images in the recognizable and familiar, and in the overt demonstration of her eccentric, unusual methods of animation. This is far from the somatic, subjective reading that has dominated writings on Menken. It is, rather, a concoction that makes its effects legible, grounding its compositions with repeated returns to more easily identifiable subjects that remind viewers of precisely how the effects are/can be achieved. Menken is interested in achievable, repeatable ecstasy.

This embrace of something like the operational aesthetic is perhaps what ties Menken most closely to the amateur filmmaking movement that had, by the 1960s, more or less dissipated. She never theorized like Deren, never wrote for Movie Makers, and never overtly inserted herself into the amateur discourse or the discourse of the flowering postwar avant-garde cinema. And yet there still does seem to be an implicitly amateur audience being addressed by Menken. As I’ve been trying to show, her demonstrations are also guides: here’s how you achieve these effects, here’s how you animate images, here’s how you create movement, here’s how you create squiggles and scribbles of light.¹⁷

An Absolute Breakthrough: Visual Variations on Noguchi

But I’ve been speaking almost exclusively about Menken’s later films. For Brakhage, it’s Menken’s early work that was truly revolutionary. As he saw it, Menken’s 1945 film Visual Variations on Noguchi is the work that broke open the avant-garde, not only announcing a new era of visual filmmaking but which innovated in ways that made possible entirely new developments within the community. For Brakhage, Noguchi inaugurated an aesthetic that even more radically rejected the principles of “good” filmmaking put forward by both Hollywood and by the amateur movement. It was not just a remarkable artistic achievement, but a radical advancement in cinematic language.

Noguchi is all the more radical for its simplicity, consisting solely of Menken’s explosively kinetic documentation of the sculptures in her friend Isamu Noguchi’s studio. Menken’s handheld camera moves up, down, and around Noguchi’s abstract sculptures, tracing their blobby, eccentric forms with variably rapid camera movements, building rhythms and tensions into the film strip. Brakhage ecstatically describes the film as “an absolute breakthrough, in which the human body took off the camera, not to simulate stumbling through the battlefield… or to simulate, you know, first person singularity of any kind, but to be that vibration that the whole nervous system Is, and ordinarily Is, and in ecstasy can be, can make a form of such.”¹⁸ Not without condescension, for Brakhage, Menken’s films, Noguchi especially, become the story of their filming, and he detailed his understanding of her frame: “an enormous woman, easily six feet, two inches tall, with broad and solid shoulders, a surprisingly slim waist and stout but shapely legs, like a dancer’s.”¹⁹ It is her body, and her body’s relation to the camera, that matters most to him.

The shakes and swings of Noguchi might indeed be understood in the gestural sense as Brakhage rhapsodizes: Menken is responding to her friend’s artwork in the same way that abstract-expressionism was understood by critics like Harold Rosenberg, for whom each stroke of paint on a canvas was a response to the previous, the paint registering the artist’s reactions. And in that sense, it might indeed be thought of as the founding document for the avant-garde’s gestural expressionism, the announcement of a new set of aesthetic and expressive possibilities for the handheld camera that would guide filmmakers for decades. But thinking in terms of animation offers another reading: as with the tree, the street lights, the nighttime traffic, Menken is bringing the static sculpture to life. Brakhage writes that Menken had told him the film was “an attempt to capture ‘the flying spirit of movement within these solid objects.’ She wanted to get across ‘how they made me feel.’”²⁰ Channeling the motion she sees within its composition, releasing it, per Brakhage, but also animating it, creating and demonstrating its internal movement through camerawork. The camera isolates and juxtaposes the lines of Noguchi’s sculptures, of the wood grain, of the shadows they cast. Menken shoots almost exclusively in close-up to emphasize and compare individual details at the expense of the overall composition. This is not simple documentation but Menken’s selection of forms, a very personal curation of shapes and textures translated into movement by the pans and tilts of her camera.

Noguchi can equally be related to Menken’s previous work as cinematographer on her husband Willard Maas’s Geography of the Body (1943). That film’s detailed exploration of the body, often in extreme close-ups (filmed through a magnifying glass) that isolate body parts, comes mostly in static shots. As with Lights, the film is structured around a tension between abstraction (here a kind of radical defamiliarization of body parts in extreme close-up) and recognizable photographic referents. The title, and the intrusive poetry of Maas’s voiceover, works against total defamiliarization. We see both a hairy male chest and female breasts, so we know this is not a single subject, but we know that these are all images of human bodies, no matter how close and seemingly abstract the image might be.²¹ This is perhaps an incoherent geography, or at least one that seeks to stitch together multiple bodies into a kind of totalizing, genderfluid map. And yet, it feels clinical: a series of close-ups that present their subjects as if inspecting them for blemishes.

Geography’s handful of slightly shaky close-ups are the most intimate, most sensual moments in the film. The minor, sometimes imperceptible shake indicates intimate closeness between the camera – and the camera operator – and the subject. It is those few handheld shots which distances the film from an almost antiseptic, medicalized visual analysis that so often threatens to drag it down. That shake is a reminder of human operation and human engagement – the erotic, sensuous potential of handheld camerawork comes, as Menken and Maas understood in 1943, from the interaction of bodies. The shakiness of Menken’s camera in close-up viscerally communicates her closeness to the body she’s photographing. It places us in equally intimate proximity: the extreme closeness of the close-up emphasizes each jostle of the camera.

As much as Noguchi is a wild, swinging release of energy, it’s also a human encounter – if less explicitly intimate than Geography of the Body. It isn’t “sensual” in the same way that Geography is, but it is intimate. And the film is structured around that intimate encounter. For Brakhage, that encounter comprised the foundation of gestural expressionism, Menken’s camera registering her reactions to the sculpture in front of her. But that presumes that the film centers the filmmaker, that it to some degree it is structured around a singular filmic subject whose perspective is expressed through the camera – as with all of Brakhage’s readings of Menken, this is not incorrect but it is partial, and limiting.

Noguchi contains several versions of what would be one of Menken’s signature camera movements: handheld panning and tilting tracing the lines of a structure – see, for example, her interpretation of the Alhambra in Arabesque for Kenneth Anger, or the less exotic subject of “Sidewalks” from Notebook. This dissection of shape and line isolates and defamiliarizes bits and pieces of structure, but it’s also exploratory. Menken proffers an interpretation of the work, one potential roadmap for working through the sculptures. Or rather, many interpretations, and many potential roadmaps. Its shakiness in part works against a sense of authority or of control over the subject, but also against teleology. The film announces its partiality through its hesitations and bounces, and in doing so suggests that each shot or sequence is but one way of working through Noguchi’s sculptures. Menken’s camera may channel the fluid lines of Noguchi’s work, but it does so imperfectly, bringing a sense of humanity, of the human hand, to the vaguely machinic smoothness of Noguchi’s style. Those wild, shaky swings animate the sculpture. Menken brings the sculpture to life through her camera movements just as she did the lights in Lights. She’s “bringing out the movement” that’s already present in Noguchi’s lines, but she’s also creating something in response: motion. These are not the more clinical examinations of Geography of the Body but a jubilant response that engages with and is inspired by the movement she reads into the lines of Noguchi’s sculptures. The shakiness of her camera is key to that animation: they demonstrate that it’s done by human hands, neither mastering nor limiting our understanding of the sculpture, but instead open it up to a cascading series of possibilities.

Diaries, Notes, Sketches: Menken and Mekas

Reading Menken’s films in terms of animation, of course, does not does not change the terms of her massive influence on the next generation. Yet while Brakhage most vociferously extolled Menken as an originary figure in avant-garde filmmaking, her influence, especially through the logic of gestural expressionism, is most visibly evident in the films of Jonas Mekas.

Take Menken’s Go! Go! Go! (1962–64), which diaristically collects moments from around NYC, all filmed at a slow camera speed to generate a fast-motion effect of her subjects whizzing through the city. Go! Go! Go! is structured around discrete sequences, including a variety of street scenes, records of outdoor graduations and wedding ceremonies, ships in a harbor, a bodybuilding competition. The harbor sequence is closely echoed by Mekas’s Cassis (1966), later integrated into his first epic diary compilation, Walden: Diaries, Notes, and Sketches (1964–1969). But where Menken employs the effect to blur the line between animation and live-action, Mekas, like Brakhage, sees the potential for gestural expressionism, and he would build a great deal of his filmmaking practice around the device that Menken employs in Go! Go! Go!. For Mekas, the shaky, fast-motion image very noticeably registers each shift of attention, thereby articulating not just documentary value but implicit, subjective commentary.

Again, while Menken’s work is not opposed to that reading, it is not entirely comprised by it, and the differences with Mekas matter. Go! Go! Go!, after a charming title sequence in which Menken herself makes an appearance in silhouette, begins with a breakneck series of shots flying through New York from a car. The barrage of images zips by at a clip that is barely intelligible to the viewer. The chaotic energy of the sequence begins to settle as the camera crosses a bridge and, as the car continues to move forward, begins to stabilize to follow ships in the distance. The following sequences pursue that motif from a tripod, positioning first alongside the harbor and then from a higher vantage point.

The first shot roughly pans to follow a large ship. The fast-motion paired with the gradual, incremental pan creates an effect that is alternately uncanny and hilarious: the ship seems to remain almost motionless, while the water froths furiously around it. The next shot remains stationary as the ships hurtle across the screen, made even more dance-like, more animation-like in the subsequent shots. If the former looks like rough stop-motion, movement in the latter sequence, shot from high angles, farther away, is supremely graceful, as if the boats are skaters gliding across an iced-over lake. The chaotic roughness of the waves no longer visible from the greater distance, her camera tricks once again demonstrate the nature of her technique before translating that into a sublime moment of transcendence. Menken’s undercranked camera either creates or reveals the elegance of these giant machines in motion.

These opening scenes are considerably less shaky than much of the handheld fast-motion to come, but they serve to establish the film’s emphasis on, and relationship to, movement. It’s a machinic movement, the resulting images zipping by too quickly for viewers to pick up more than a few isolated details. The harbor section, on the other hand, reveals or creates balletic motion in its subjects. As the film proceeds, these two sequences define the film’s philosophy of movement, even as it generates further kinesis through handheld movement. But the focus is on the revelation of already-present patterns and habits of movement. This is, for Suarez, surgical: “she cut into reality in order to reveal intricate configurations indiscernible to the unaided eye.”²² When she then films a graduation ceremony and a bodybuilding competition, the shaky instability of the image and its wandering attention indicate handheld camerawork. More subdued than the ecstatic swirlings of Lights, the handheld cinematography of Go! Go! Go! finds and exaggerates movement in its subjects, transforming people into cartoonish creatures through the fast-motion that reveals predictable patterns and pathways. The fuzzy line between the camera creating and revealing its subjects’ movement is essential to its aesthetic. There is again little sense of mastering or controlling her subjects, no imposition of a subjective interpretation, even if it is only through her virtuosity that bodybuilders turn into slapstick cartoon characters, or a graduation ceremony turns into a bumper car traffic pile-up.

Here the camera is truly somatic in that its inscription of Menken’s bodily rhythms, and her attention, is foregrounded, while the kinetic fireworks of more emphatic or deliberate handheld camera movements (as in Lights or Visual Variations on Noguchi) are mostly absent. The shakiness does indeed testify to the creation of movement by a camera wielded by human hands, but it allows that movement to upstage the directorial guidance behind it – without, of course, eradicating it. It humanizes the machinelike speed and the superficially regular patterns with which her fast-forwarded subjects seem to move. Or, rather, it posits that such mediated movement can only be created through human engagement with the apparatus: this is not merely somatic registration, but an assertion of humanity.

Mekas’s Cassis, by contrast, never fails to register its directorial presence, even as it remains on a tripod. Shot in the south of France, Cassis films ships zipping in fast motion through a harbor’s waters from a similarly high, distant angle. Mekas’ film, however, unfolds in a single shot, its time scale stretched out further over the course of a day and into the night, adding periodic pans. Whereas Menken’s film first pans to follow a ship, then in subsequent shots remains stationary, Mekas’s camera is mostly stationary, with pans reframing the shot independent of ship movement. It foregrounds the directorial hand, without being handheld. Cassis’s movement comes not from a collusion/collaboration of camera and subject, but from their separation. The choppy time-lapse motion of boats and pedestrians and the camera pans have no evident relationship – the latter reminding viewers that this effect is the filmmaker’s interpretation, or imposition.

This is not meant to diminish Mekas’s practice, or Menken’s influence, but to create further separation between Mekas’s understanding of cinematography and Menken’s own practice. Mekas’s signature style, developed over the course of the 1960s, is built on even shakier handheld camerawork, the image emphatically serving as an explicit index of his interpretive, authorial presence. Most of the rest of Walden consists of more traditionally diary-like spurts of filming: friends, family, street scenes –and nearly all of the rest would be handheld. Mekas shoots at variable speeds, the image moving faster and slower with dynamic abruptness, and his camera is typically fidgety and, like Menken’s, incredibly kinetic. But it always refers to Mekas as the camera operator, expressively following his attention and responding to the world around him and, as such, incorporating subjective commentary into the act of what is otherwise documentary filming. In the “Kreeping Kreplachs Meet to Discuss World Problems” section of Walden’s Reel Two, for example, the camera drifts from participant to participant during a conversation about the arts. It lingers on the faces of the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovksy, and Barbara Rubin, but not necessarily while they’re speaking – the scene contains direct sound recording, but the audio is not synchronized with the sped-up visuals. Instead the camera freely wanders the small crowd, worried less about finding whoever is speaking than in studying the faces, hands, and other details of each person as they listen. What is revelatory about this sequence, its remarkable documentary value, comes in Mekas’s ability to capture moments of spontaneous interaction. Because he isn’t attempting to follow the back and forth of the conversation with his camera; he captures moments where Ginsberg, in particular, is listening intently and feels moved to speak up. We see such decisions and reactions play out on their faces. Visually, it’s Mekas’s attention that we’re following here, and which provides the structuring principles of the sequence and the film, rather than the flow of conversation. Walden is a documentary that is structured not by the events it records, but by the person wielding the camera. And he is mostly absent from the image, frequently absent from the soundtrack, but always present through the jittery motion of his camera.

Reel One of Walden contains an extremely brief, lovely tribute, “Flowers for Marie Menken.” Inspired by Menken’s comparatively sedate Glimpse of the Garden (1957) as well as her more jittery films like Lights and Go! Go! Go! (not to mention Menken’s own delightful corpus of films made “for” her friends), “Flowers” shoots a flower garden in and out of focus, with rapid camera movement as well as rapid editing. In the final moments of this 30-second sequence, a faint superimposition of nighttime traffic draws a direct link to Lights and Moonplay underneath the cheery daytime tableaux, which includes a neck-down medium shot of a man holding flowers. The sequence is both a tribute and a gift, a cinematic equivalent of a bouquet.²³

In Mekas’s tribute, you see the same tension between abstraction and figuration that’s found in Lights, the same kinetic interpretation found in Visual Variations on Noguchi. But there is no sense of Menken’s animation. No transformation of still objects into moving subjects. Menken’s camerawork and camera tricks bring things to life. By contrast, Mekas scrutinizes and analyzes his subjects, such as in “Flowers,” when the first anthropomorphic figure appears: a fountain statue. Mekas presents a brief barrage of images of the statue from several slightly different angles. The striking cinematography in this section hovers around the statue, several shots tellingly obscured by interceding foliage.

When Menken photographs a water fountain in one of her own tribute films, Arabesque for Kenneth Anger (1961), she first films it in long shot, then closer to examine the light reflection. When her now-undercranked camera glides over the sculpted dog-like figures lining the fountain’s circular base, it ascribes a kinetic energy to a structure that she had already revealed to be literally immobile. She then follows the movement created by the fountain, first tilting down the spout of water’s trajectory and following that with a pair of shots – shaky but stationary – of the water’s upward motion. Those final two shots are ambiguous, as they do show water movement, but from the angle at which they are filmed, the vertical line of water seems almost as static as the stone around it. Once again, Menken organizes her sequences around a dense hierarchy of motion, which points back to movement, or to references to movement, contained within the structure itself. This brief (slightly over 20-second) sequence in Arabesque strongly resembles Visual Variations in that sense, with the addition of literal pro-filmic movement within the structure (the spouting water). Mekas’s photography of the fountain statue, however, gets its considerable energy from the jittery shakiness of the camera and the stroboscopically rapid editing – it is Mekas’s attention that is animated, not the sculpture itself. He isn’t bringing it to life or discovering movement within it, but registering his shifting attention. He imposes a rhythm and a pattern onto the scene. Or, rather, he uses the images taken to create his own rhythm.

This is the distinction between Menken’s work and the gestural expressionism espoused by Mekas and Brakhage. Menken was among the first avant-garde filmmakers to systematically violate the rules of technical proficiency, and she did so not only by nudging the practices of home movie-making into the burgeoning avant-garde movement but also by creating a complex (if implicit) aesthetic philosophy of movement and animation. If Menken’s handheld camera is generative, if it creates new sorts of motion, then it also insistently grounds her abstract, colorful, dynamic creations in the properties of her profilmic subjects: Menken reveals the movement, the animation, already present in flowers, in water, in sculptures, in people.