The Short Films of Marie Menken - Enzian Theater

All free La CinOMAthéque screenings will take place in the Truist Auditorium at the Orlando Museum of Art.

ACCESS FOR ALL AT OMA presents:

La CinOMAthéque: A collaboration between OMA and Enzian, with generous support provided by the Art Bridges Foundation’s Access for All program.

The Orlando Museum of Art is thrilled to announce the launch of La CinOMAthéque in partnership with the Enzian Theater, as part of its “Access for All at OMA,” an all-new program offering FREE admission to the museum!

Access for All at OMA is a monthly free day dedicated to the community. La CinOMAthéque will be a series of 6 bimonthly free screenings of experimental, avant-garde, art films in the Truist auditorium at OMA on Access for All day.

Each screening will be introduced by a UCF film professor and include a talkback with OMA Chief Curator Coralie Claeysen-Gleyzon and Enzian Programming Manager Tim Anderson.

The Short Films of Marie Menken:

Marie Menken (1910-1970) is the unsung heroine of the American avant-garde cinema. A mentor, muse and major influence for such key experimental filmmakers as Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas and Andy Warhol, Menken created an extraordinary body of exuberant and stunningly beautiful films shaped, above all, by her intuitive understanding of handheld cinematography. Beginning with her celebrated first film, Visual Variations on Noguchi (1945), Menken used the hand-cranked Bolex camera favored by avant-garde filmmakers to introduce a new agility, grace and spontaneity into experimental cinema, a lightness of camera and form hitherto unseen in American film. With Noguchi, Menken also began a spirited dialogue between cinema and the plastic and painterly arts that extends across her films in a witty yet deeply insightful exploration of the formal language and methodology specific to those schools and painters with whom Menken was close – from the Abstract Expressionist drip painting humorously critiqued in Drips in Strips (1963), to the factory production of Pop art in the revelatory Andy Warhol (1964) and the Fluxus practice of Robert Watts in Watts with Eggs (1967).

Featuring:
Watts with Eggs (1967, 2.5 min)
Wrestling (1964, 8 min)
Visual Variations on Noguchi (1945, 4 min)
Notebook (1962, 10 min)
Lights (1966, 6.5 min)
Go Go Go! (1964, 11.5 min)
Glimpse of the Garden (1957, 5 min)
Eye Music in Red Major (1961, 5.5 min)
Excursion (1968, 5 min)
Drips in Strips (1961, 2.5 min)
Arabesque for Kenneth Anger (1961, 4 min)
Andy Warhol (1965, 22 min)
Sidewalks (1966, 6.5 min)

1945 - 1968, 93 minutes, USA, Directed by Marie Menken

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“Marie Menken is a lyrical poet. The structure of Menken's filmic sentences, her movements, and her rhythms are those of poetry. She transposes reality into poetry. It's through poetry that Menken reveals to us the subtle aspects of reality, the mysteries of the world and the mysteries of her own soul.”
– Jonas Mekas, FILMMAKER
“Her hand-held camera directly capturing external light shaped into representational images on film is, at the same time, recording her whole body’s reaction to what she is seeing through that camera.”
– Stan Brakhage, FILMMAKER