Fairytale of New York: Marie Menken’s ‘Lights’ (1966)

Lights is a joyous distillation of the beauty that abounds during the holiday season, and the darkness that surrounds it

Be7# 1–0. Adolf Anderssen defeats Lionel Kieseritzky with an unprecedented pure mate in the Immortal Game in 1851. This off-the-books challenge, a heavyweight side match at the very first international chess tournament, held in London, is typically regarded as the pinnacle of Romantic Chess, an era that prized dashing tactical maneuvers and daring sacrifice. True to its honorific, the duel ripples through the ages as shorthand for both audacious brilliance and the intransigent desire for longevity. When Roy Batty checkmates Eldon Tyrell in Blade Runner — part of a dying replicant’s gambit to appeal to his creator for more time — that’s the Immortal Game on the board. But the best echo of this timeless showdown belongs to Maya Deren. She mined it for all its worth in 1944 for her experimental landmark At Land. In Deren’s eye, shot through a surrealist sensibility, the spirit of Romantic Chess is fully expressed but also sharply rewritten. Deren’s high-wire playfulness, full of evocative symbolism and randomness for its own sake, melds intellect and flair while also literally giving women a seat at the table.

Zoom out and the chess sequences in At Land take on even greater significance: These stop-motion animations were created by Marie Menken in her first filmic contribution on record. Thus, At Land is also a flashpoint in film history wherein the torch is passed from one pioneering female avant-garde filmmaker to the next. And yet, seismic as this moment is, Marie Menken (née Martina Kudláček) remains a relatively unsung heroine of experimental film. She would start shooting her first film the year after At Land, making a splash in 1945 with Visual Variations on Noguchi. It’d take her a dozen years to complete another.

It’s ironic that Menken entered the stage by crafting animations set at a lavish shindig. She’s mainly remembered these days as a socialite and lynchpin figure from the pivotal era of underground art stretching from the ’40s through the ’60s. She was a creature of Bohemian New York at its peak of romance and excess, existing at the center of myriad blossoming art scenes at their swingingest. Her parties were the stuff of legend, her social circle was unreal, and her personal life was tragically volatile. Menken and her longtime creative and marital partner, Willard Maas (aka DeVerne Bookwalter’s rumored off-screen co-star in Andy Warhol’s Blow Job [1964]), were supposedly the inspiration for George and Martha in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? — the couple’s most enduring claim to fame. Menken also appeared in several Warhol films herself — on camera, that is — including The Life of Juanita Castro (1965), Prison (1965), and Chelsea Girls (1966).

Menken was a fitfully successful painter as well as an avid chronicler of mid-century experimental art. Among her modest body of collected film works, she took crucial ground-level snapshots of artists working in modernist sculpture, in Visual Variations on Noguchi (1945); the intersection of the exotic and erotic, in Arabesque for Kenneth Anger (1961); Abstract Expressionism, in Drips in Strip (1963); Pop Art, in her film portrait Andy Warhol (1964); and Fluxus, with Watts with Eggs (1967), while developing an unassuming neo-Dada language all her own. She and Maas also co-founded the Gryphon Group in the mid-’40s, the first experimental film production company and an important early attempt at cooperative filmmaking, which brought together artists and intellectuals — Stan Brakhage, Charles Boultenhouse, and Gregory Markopoulos among them. Menken punched the clock working the graveyard shift in the communications department at Time magazine for decades then partied spectacularly and recklessly in her off-hours. She succumbed to her lifestyle in 1970 at age 61. “Marie’s drinking finally killed her,” reported friend and acolyte Brakhage.

Menken died at the tail-end of the holiday season of that year, on December 29. Maas followed just four days later. Of Menken’s cluster of significant ’60s short films, I find myself this holiday season smitten with her rapturous five-minute masterpiece Lights (1966). Lights bottles pure joy and harbors untold depths. It’s Menken’s most vibrant work and the purest distillation of her fascinations with perspective and the combustible relationship between movement and light. It’s a multivalent piece that deserves a place of prominence as an alt-classic arthouse holiday perennial. Shot and carefully edited over the course of two years, Lights is not just a shimmering time-capsule of ’60s NYC in wintertime, at its most glistening and hopeful; it is also a portal into the filmmaker’s conflicted psyche.

Shot using her signature Bolex 16mm camera, without a light meter, in the hours after midnight when the streets were quietest, Lights is a tone poem of merriment and mischief. Harkening back to her eccentric, effulgent paintings — covered in phosphorescent paint, crushed glass, snakeskin, sand, sequins, you name it — Lights is the clearest translation of those reflective canvases to film. It is also a brilliant showcase for Menken’s uniquely deft and intuitive handheld cinematography. At 6-foot-2 she cut an imposing figure, but her films betray a lightness and disarming delicacy. “She had a feeling for movement and rhythm that was like a dancer,” said Kenneth Anger, who lived with Menken and Maas around the time he filmed Scorpio Rising (1963). Lights is perhaps her most balletic film — albeit deceptively haphazard — a showcase for her “somatic camera,” as P. Adams Sitney referred to it, at turns graceful and frenzied, with Menken in total command of her surroundings and in thrall to all the stimuli. In this film especially, her uncanny ability to edit in-camera as she filmed is witnessed at its most dazzling.

Lights zips through a three-part structure. You have to imagine the warm whirring of the film projector as you watch in silence. In the first sequence, we’re acclimated to the holiday atmosphere, taking the point of view of a reveler marveling at a Christmas tree covered in illuminated bells. From the outset we’re in an absurdist headspace, craning up at the tree and its ornaments from underneath at an awkward angle, almost like we’re looking to scurry up the trunk. This section offers something like the photo negative of Glimpse of the Garden (1957), perhaps Menken’s most celebrated film, which observed various fauna on a microscopic scale. The beginning of Lights is just as curious about this pine tree that has been chopped down and staged in a setting of concrete and metal for the public’s enjoyment. But the mass-produced plastic and electricity wrapped around the conifer dominates the frame as the branches and needles recede to the background in silhouette.

The camera shakes gleefully as the bells streak and lose their shape within the frame, and we’re off. In the next section, we’re galavanting through the wee hours, speeding down the sidewalk, twirling and cartwheeling and taking in the sights at an accelerated clip — gently pushing against the limits of human agility. Everything on the block is illuminated and outlined with strands of lights. Brief glimpses of denominational markers dot the journey, remnants perhaps of Menken’s Roman Catholic upbringing. Up is down and vice versa as the world loses its bearings and tilts off its axis. And finally, inevitably, everything starts to disintegrate. In the final act, the environment flattens and matter dissolves before our eyes. The light-seer is overcome by photopsia as phantom flashes of color flit unpredictably. Bands of the visible spectrum at their most basic and sublime dance chaotically against a black field.

Moving from simple and coherent yuletide images to pure abstraction, Lights is a joyous distillation of the beauty that abounds during the holiday season, and the darkness that surrounds it. The short is so exuberant that it circles all the way around and grazes melancholy. It traffics in an almost pathological cheerfulness that reads hollow and desperate the longer and closer you look. Knowing Menken’s fate, it’s easier to see Lights as a disorienting depiction of someone in the throes of alcoholism. The twirling takes on a different dimension when you see it as the point of view of someone lost and intoxicated, aimlessly careening through the city as the bars wind down and the streets are mostly empty. The beautiful colors are your only company as your vision blurs.

Menken made small, personal, lyrical films that don’t seek to scandalize or provoke, and yet, underneath a playful surface are radical innovations and profound pathos. Her work is something of an anomaly relative to the confrontational artists she rubbed shoulders with. Even in a film as seemingly buoyant and topsy-turvy as the avant-yuletide kitsch of Lights, depression and self-destruction are baked in. It’s hard to overstate how prescient her diaristic short-form filmmaking approach was, pioneering a mode of expression — arguably the dominant mode of expression — that took purchase in our postmodern times: a turbulent mixture of mundane and vibrant, spontaneous and exacting, beautiful and garish, awestruck and overstimulated. In her late-night sojourns through the streets of New York, Menken transformed her Bolex into an instrument for painting restless, resplendent compositions on the fly from a sea of glowing filament.

Lights falls in some uncertain place between wild-eyed holiday celebration and literally over-cranked critique. It’s uptempo yet still somehow embodies the loneliness and isolation that tends to be amplified during the holiday season. The style of the bookend credits, adorned with reflective confetti and fanciful lettering, nods to the rosy-cheeked cutesiness of your average mid-century Christmas special. Walking the line between parody and fetishization, Lights lands smack in the middle of the Rankin-Bass/Charles Shultz holiday special heyday. It punctuates the mid-’60s holy trinity of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964), A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), and How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966).

The nightscape of this light-strewn, postcard-perfect city is unsteady and tremulous. Menken runs the holiday through a centrifuge until it breaks down to its material elements. The universe tears at a molecular level. With its allusions to fission and annihilation, there are some long-tail Cold War, peak-Vietnam echoes in the film, a prevailing sense that the decorations are merely a façade covering something we’re too indifferent, distracted, and bleary to see. At the same time, these lightbulbs are warmth and comfort in the cold, providing hope and wonderment at your lowest and loneliest. The images pull your attention away from blotted out objects and toward their gleam, their surface, their approximate outline, the brushstrokes against the canvas. This is a holiday scene without people, made of electricity and shadow — a jubilant post-human holiday.

The 16mm film stock gives Lights a home movie feel, like a syrupy document of happy times now fading from memory. The shape of the idyllic scenes are actually deteriorating as we watch. And yet, everything is sped up and intensified. It’s overcome with the spirit of the holidays, the intoxicating swirl of lights and pageantry heightened to a sort of mania. Even the camera is beset with wide-eyed wonder, the aperture yielding swirling streaks of light. The images spin with such abandon that the settings, shot unadorned and relatively unfiltered, become dreamlike, whimsical, even magical. This is a winter wonderland as fantastical and enclosed as any marshmallow world, with wattage covering everything to infinity.

Long after working with Maya Deren, Menken was still building and exploring unstable worlds. Dizzying and hyperactive, Lights is an essential city film, capturing that brief window of time when the trappings of the season saturate everything and the good tidings are suffocating. It combines the hyperspeed approach to capturing a metropolis from Menken’s earlier Go Go Go (1964), and Sidewalks (1966) thereafter, with a witching-hour wooziness. This is the Christmas industrial complex as it exists in public spaces, at its most generic and impersonal by design, full of inanimate objects to attract your eye and attention. As a first-generation Lithuanian American, like friend and collaborator Jonas Mekas, Menken’s view of the city still retains the perspective of an outsider, taking in the cityscape in all its wonder and fury and alienation. In most Christmas movies, the city is a maze to be run, a sensorium to survive. Lights depicts the gauntlet with no clear stakes or context, just unbridled momentum.

In this fairytale of New York, all the lights of the city — street lights, headlights, taillights, stoplights, etc. — become holiday decorations. Everything is celebratory; everything is imbued with the spirit; all is strung together in revelry. Whether or not it’s brought on by a chemically-induced delirium, Menken captures the eye’s inability to take in so much stimulation and splendor all at once, the mind racing to keep up with the overload of beauty and sentimentality bombarding you from all angles. This scintillating scotoma portends a searing migraine to come. All is merry and bright, yet everything that is not light is dark. The brightness deepens the darkness around it. Even at its most lighthearted and full of wonderment, New York is tinged with menace and uncanniness.

In the span of minutes, Menken initiates a chain reaction from nocturnal New York City to another dimension. She returns the commercial holiday symbols back to the cosmos. Reality as we know it breaks down before our eyes as she zeroes in on the optical properties of her machine, the photometry of film, the strain of a throttled retina, the phenomena of light bending and refracting, the luminous flux of the cityscape, the electrical discharges that surround us, and the quantum mechanics that connect everything. The three-dimensionality of the tableaus, the most fundamental illusion of cinema, flattens as we enter a subatomic state where photons dance in a vacuum. Our perspective is reoriented to the building blocks of the X and Y axes. With Lights, Menken chases that futile idea of immortality, reaching for some level of transcendence, and yuletide spiritual reckoning, as she leaves behind the corporeal world and becomes one with the fabric of the universe.

For more on Lights, we recommend checking out Split Tooth contributor Stephen Broomer‘s audio commentary for the film at Art & Trash:

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