Left: Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey, Chelsea Girls, 1966, still from a color film in 16 mm, 210 minutes. Marie Menken. Right: Marie Menken, The Gravediggers from Guadix, 1960, still from a color film in 16 mm.

MARIE MENKEN was six-foot-two and hefty, with a foghorn voice that could silence a room, but she made films whose delicacy was their surprise. “Marie’s films were her flower garden,” wrote Jonas Mekas, in his obituary for Menken, who died in 1970 at age sixty-one. “Whenever she was in her garden she opened her soul, with all her secret wishes and dreams. They are all very colorful and sweet and perfect, and not too bulky, all made and tended with love, her little movies.”

Some of these colorful and yes, perfectly formed—but never sweet—movies are included in the Essential Cinema collection of Anthology Film Archives. Nevertheless, Menken is rarely if ever mentioned in the company of the giants of twentieth-century postwar avant-garde filmmakers. In Martina Kudláček’s Notes on Marie Menken (2006), however, many of those giants express not only their admiration for Menken’s films but also describe the profound influence her work had on their own. Mekas, who gave Menken her first solo film show in 1961, confides that her handheld 16-mm notations of “nothing spectacular, everything usual and daily” was a direct influence on his own work. “She was doing what I didn’t dare.” Stan Brakhage extends the compliment: “If there is a single filmmaker I owe most to for the development of my own filmmaking,” he says, “it would be Marie Menken.” And there are similarly effusive, certainly not unwarranted but nevertheless surprising tributes from the Austrian filmmaker/archivist Peter Kubelka and from Kenneth Anger, who at the time he discovered the biker subculture of Scorpio Rising (1964), was living with Menken and her husband, the poet and filmmaker Willard Maas, in their Brooklyn Heights apartment.

During her lifetime, Menken’s work was overshadowed by her flamboyant persona and odd-couple marriage, which was the inspiration for the battling Martha and George in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962). Maas was gay, part of a circle of artists and writers that formed an “Alt” salon to the doggedly hetero Cedar Bar. Maas’s sexuality seemingly did not interfere with his devotion to Menken; when she died he was so devastated that he followed her just four days later. They both held full-time jobs—Menken worked the night shift in the communications department at Time magazine—but on the weekends, they drank spectacularly and fought nonstop.

Kudláček composed Notes… largely by intercutting interviews with Menken’s colleagues and friends with clips from her subject’s films. The clips are well chosen, and Kudláček uses longer segments than are usual in this genre of filmmaker portrait. One gets a good sense of Menken’s refined sense of her movies’ internal rhythms—the interplay between camera movement and the dance of color and light. As a painter, Menken often covered the surface of her canvas with sequins and bits of broken glass so that they shimmered into a life in time, but, as the painter/filmmaker Alfred Leslie observes, it was not until she picked up a movie camera that she found her true medium. There is not much film of Menken herself, but the bits are choice and include a few seconds of Menken’s turn in Warhol’s Chelsea Girls (1966) where she plays Gerard Malanga’s harridan of a mother. Malanga supplies many fond memories of Menken at the Factory. Warhol, who was also one of her fans, is seen in a deteriorated clip (the chemical changes in the celluloid an echo of Menken’s kaleidoscopic color effects) fighting a rooftop duel with Menken, their 16-mm Bolexes simultaneously turned, like weapons, on each other. An audio recording of Menken singing “Toot, Toot, Tootsie, Goodbye” in her pitch-perfect rough-edged alto provides a fittingly heartbreaking but unsentimental exit.

— Amy Taubin

Notes on Marie Menken has been released on DVD by Icarus Films Home Video. Among the extras are three of Menken’s films including Glimpse of the Garden (1957). For more details, click here.

Left: chameckilerner, Conversation with Boxing Gloves, 2009, color video in HD, 4 minutes. Production still. Right: Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Thaïs, 1917, still from a black-and-white film.

“ONE MUST FREE THE CINEMA as an expressive medium in order to make it the ideal instrument of a new art,” wrote F. T. Marinetti in 1916. “We are convinced that only in this way can one reach that polyexpressiveness toward which all the most modern artistic researches are moving. . . . Today the Futurist cinema creates precisely the polyexpressive symphony.”

Thus Marinetti—accompanied by his ever-present cohort of innovators and incendiaries—launched the Futurist incursion into yet another medium. Seeking to liberate film from those narrative set pieces still beholden to the theater, the Futurists clamored for a cinema indebted solely to its own visual and aesthetic qualities. Those qualities—violent jumps of time and space, flux and dynamic mobility, conflations of different senses in one aesthetic idiom—already reflected, even epitomized, profoundly Futurist imperatives. In theory, film constituted the “ideal” art with which the Futurists would slay the musty conventions of “passéiste” culture.

In practice, however, production failed to match prediction. For all the Futurists’ enthusiasm, very few actual films were realized. Even fewer remain extant. On the occasion of Performa’s 2009 biennial, which takes Futurism’s centenary as its basis, the Anthology Film Archive gathers those singular films that issued from, or were informed by, Futurist activity. Comprising six separate programs, “The Polyexpressive Symphony,” curated by Performa’s Lana Wilson, kicks off with a sequence of rare prints, including excerpts from Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s Thaïs (1917), the only known surviving feature-length Futurist film, as well as the important short Velocità (Speed, 1930). Other Italian, French, and German films that share common ground with Futurist experiments (either thematically or aesthetically) round out the different evenings’ offerings. Each program centers on a specific motif (performance, trains, mechanization, etc.) and stretches from before World War I through the late twentieth century.

“The Polyexpressive Symphony” culminates in the premiere of Futurist Life Redux—a series of short digital videos (and, in two instances, films) brought together by Wilson and curator Andrew Lampert and specially commissioned for Performa 09. These shorts venture contemporary versions of the eleven sequences that made up the lost Vita Futurista (Futurist Life), filmed in 1916 and first screened at Florence’s Teatro Niccolini. Using experimental techniques (like dual-screen imagery and double exposures), Vita Futurista contrasted “antiquated” forms of living with the exploits of “dynamic” Futurists. Existing only in a few remaining still images (bearing titles like The Dance of Geometric Splendor and Introspective Research into States of Mind), as well as a written account by Bruno Corra, Vita Futurista has provided the chosen artists with some elusive points of aesthetic departure. Of course, departing from past examples—rather than copying or honoring them—was a key Futurist credo, one these individuals have taken seriously, even as they honor the original film’s quirky sense of humor. IO NON SONO MARINETTI (I am not Marinetti) read the T-shirts worn by the protagonists of one sequence—Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Customized Marinetti—as they jog in place against the backdrop of an apocalyptic cityscape of video-game car chases marked by a sound track featuring a woman’s orgasmic moans.

Many of the works do not simply rehearse Futurist predilections, themes, or imagery but also critique them by pressing the movement’s own terms. Perhaps the most striking in this vein is a video by the duo chameckilerner, whose take on a scene of Futurist fisticuffs replaces the scripted male characters (Marinetti and Ungari) with two women superimposed on a spare black backdrop. The conflation of the two boxing matches revivifies a Futurist delight in “simultaneity,” as well as pure visual form. But as the aggressiveness of their fight evolves into a kind of Dionysian dance, the video undermines the brash virility of the original scene (and, subtly, that of Futurism more broadly). In keeping with the Futurist insistence on synthesis, Futurist Life Redux totals a pithy forty-five minutes, ending this well-curated program with a proverbial punch.

— Ara H. Merjian

“The Polyexpressive Symphony: Futurism on Film,” runs November 3–12 at Anthology Film Archives in New York. Futurist Life Redux screens at Anthology Film Archives on November 16.

Left: Austin Lynch and Jason S., Interview Project, 2009, still from a color video from a 121-part series, 5 minutes 4 seconds. Mr. Siebert. Right: Austin Lynch and Jason S., Interview Project, 2009, still from a color video from a 121-part series, 3 minutes 37 seconds. Clinton.

IN HIS BOOK Catching the Big Fish (2006), David Lynch qualifies the darkness in his films in relation to his small-town upbringing in Missoula, Montana: “You could be anywhere and see a kind of strangeness in how the world is these days, or have a certain way of looking at things.” To illustrate this point, he recently donned the role of producer and dispatched a crew on a twenty-thousand-mile road trip across America. Led by son Austin Lynch and fellow director Jason S., the group pursued a single imperative: Ask questions.

The resulting 121-part Web series, which premiered on June 1 of this year, posts a new episode every three days, each with an introduction by the elder Lynch. Chronicling the experiences, dreams, and regrets of “ordinary” people, this Interview Project betrays a penetrating yet tender gaze that exposes the sad, bizarre, and comedic but never belittles or fetishizes. Mr. Siebert has been building model trolley cars in his basement for seven decades. Clinton planned suicide but was saved by watching Stevie Nicks on television. Jeremie has orgies to feel more beautiful. Palmer Black just wants to be remembered for his good barbecue. Many of the participants confess their bleakest hours on camera, but even more express a greater hope in God and life’s goodness.

Amid the bevy of on-screen characters, throughout the mini-documentaries it is the road itself that surfaces as one of the most compelling subjects. Signaling the crew’s literal journey, establishing shots of highways and neighborhood streets also come to represent the journey of life—a clichéd metaphor that remains shockingly poignant, repeated by lips that have tasted the bitterness of hardship, addiction, and loss. Though Interview Project is decidedly more Straight Story (1999) than Lost Highway (1997), one can still indulge disquieting Lynchian preoccupations—recalling the roads that send us careening along the time-space continuum to face our inescapable connectedness and the fluidity of our identities.

— Cameron Shaw

For more information on The Interview Project click here.

Paul Wegener, The Golem: Or How He Came into the World, 1920, stills from a black-and-white film in 35 mm, 85 minutes.

IT IS SOMEWHAT COMFORTING to know that in the past one hundred years of film, the major tropes and formulas of the horror genre have changed very little. Its stories still probe our subconscious, feeding off human insecurities; evil creatures or disturbed slashers still threaten otherwise sleepy settings where virtuous characters survive and the bawdy ones are violently eliminated. These shocks and chills, which contemporary audiences have come to expect, were established early on and Paul Wegener’s 1920 telling of the golem legend is a strong specimen. The third film in what was the first horror sequel ever produced (the first two were released in 1914 and 1917), Wegener’s adaptation The Golem: Or How He Came into the World remains an important example of German Expressionist cinema that influenced later films like Faust (1926) and Frankenstein (1931).

The film’s first intertitle reads, “The Golem: Pictures based on events in an old chronicle,” and like a written account, it is divided into five “chapters” recounting the fifteenth-century Hebrew myth of a manlike creature brought to life from clay to defend a Polish Jewish ghetto from a threatened pogrom. The story opens with a view over the stylized crooked rooftops of the ghetto, where a rabbi reading the stars learns of a threat to the community. (It is unclear whether the omen points to the pogrom or the creation of the monster.) As in so many horror movies, the warning sign is ignored, and as Venus enters Libra, the rabbi casts a spell that gives rise to an otherworldly protector. Here, the Prometheus myth meets Kabbalistic mysticism, and the results of playing God do not go unpunished; the rabbi loses control of his creature, and the golem wreaks havoc on the community. Escaping from the ghetto, the golem encounters a young child—who offers the monster a flower, a scene directly lifted by James Whale for Frankenstein—who eventually steals the beast’s life-giving amulet and returns him to inanimate clay.

While the similarities between The Golem and Frankenstein films are unmistakable, it is important to note the way science replaces religion as the popular narrative evolves, setting the stage for the height of sci-fi by the 1950s. But there will always be something captivating and mysterious about this first silent being, the golem, brought to life not by experimenting with corpses but through language, a secret word placed in an amulet. And though the remakes and sequels of horror movies continue to hold a cathartic and ritual-like power in our culture, I have yet to see a film that so simply and enigmatically deals with metaphysics and religion as this 1920 masterpiece.

— Catherine Taft

The Golem screens October 30–31 at REDCAT in Los Angeles with a live score by Brian LeBarton. For more details, click here.

Kenny Ortega, This Is It, 2009, still from a color film in 35 mm, 111 minutes.

“MICHAEL JACKSON died a long time ago, and it’s taken years for anyone to notice,” Hilton Als writes in a piercing posthumous assessment of the King of Pop in the August 13 edition of the New York Review of Books. The documentary This Is It (2009), assembled from 120 hours of rehearsal footage shot between March and June at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, where Jackson was preparing for his planned run of fifty concerts in London, tries, for 111 minutes, to revive the recently deceased. But how do you resuscitate someone who was the walking dead for at least a decade?

Beamed into Manhattan’s Regal E-Walk multiplex on Forty-second Street (and to sixteen other cities around the globe) via live transmission from LA’s Nokia Theater, director Kenny Ortega, who had worked with Jackson on the singer’s last two world tours, for Dangerous (1992–93) and HIStory (1996–97), and who was to direct the London concerts, welcomed the audience to “this last sacred documentation of our leader and friend.” MJ as messiah is established in the documentary immediately, as moon-eyed dancers, filmed on April 15, often find themselves too overcome with emotion when speaking about working with Jackson to complete a sentence. “I’m from Australia . . .,” a butch beauty starts before breaking into sobs.

The deference that Ortega, best known as the choreographer and helmer of the High School Musical franchise, shows Jackson verges on toadyism: “I couldn’t hear you, Michael, sir,” Ortega says after Jackson complains about his earpiece during “I Want You Back.” “This is monumental—Michael’s back on the cherry picker!” the director squeals during a run-through for “Beat It.”

What kind of ruler was the King of Pop, our leader and friend? His moments of perfectionist pique—“I want it the way I wrote it, the way the audience hears it”—are delivered meekly, often followed by invocations of good vibes, offering “God bless you” as a benediction to cast and crew. “With the love, L-O-V-E,” he says after the “I Want You Back” earpiece incident. “I’m trying to conserve my voice; please try to understand,” Jackson pleads with a hint of passive aggression during the end of “I’ll Be There.” “Give me all your faith. Your endurance. I love you all. We’re a family. We’re all one. Love the planet,” MJ mildly implores during a hand-holding group huddle.

Of Jackson’s own endurance, the footage—which includes material from the night before Jackson died, at age fifty, on June 25—reveals a performer whose body can still defy gravity, whose joints swivel and lock with astounding precision, but who appears attached to forty years’ worth of hits in the most mechanical, halfhearted way. Granted, This Is It was compiled from material never meant for public viewing and functions merely as a harbinger for what might have been at the O2 arena in London, where Jackson’s concerts were scheduled to begin this past July and run through March 2010. MJ is exceptionally thin, though perhaps no more so than he is in 1991’s “Black or White” video, and his BMI appears about the same as that of The L Word’s Katherine Moennig, whom Jackson, in his final days, most reminded me of. (A group of fans calling themselves This Is Not It are protesting Ortega’s film, contending that it distorts Jackson’s health by not showing how sick and frail he really was.) His speech is occasionally slurred; here, the strongest connection is to Judy Garland, another monstrously talented entertainer since childhood who died too young. Als asserts that Jackson “die[d] in exile from his body.” The painfully lackluster moves MJ drifts through during a rehearsal for “Billie Jean” suggest that his spirit had been extinguished long before.

— Melissa Anderson

This Is It opens worldwide October 28.

Hong Sang-soo, Night and Day, 2008, still from a color film in 35 mm, 144 minutes.

AT FIRST BLUSH a routine tale of the infantile adult male struggling to overcome a repressed libido, Hong Sang-soo’s aptly titled Night and Day (2008) slowly strays from its surface pleasures to embark on a far more nuanced study of romance, social norms, and identity. By day, Sung-nam (Kim Yeong-ho) is an expat South Korean artist living in Paris. Forced to flee his home and wife due to a marijuana bust, he finds himself a stranger in a strange land, often wandering the streets of France alone or in the company of Hyeon-ju (Seo Min-jeong) and Yu-jeong (Park Eun-hye)—two young and flirty art students who have captured his fancy.

Much as Judd Apatow uses boorish protagonists to spoof the social conventions of dating and monogamy, Hong uses Sung-nam’s disorientation as a lens through which he can distill courtship to its most primal urges. Without the familiar etiquette, or gender roles, of Korean culture, Sung-nam flounders as a suitor, fumbling when it comes to such basics as greetings, small talk, and seduction. He turns crude after drinking too much beer, ruins Korean dinner parties by preaching about North Korean politics, and fails repeatedly in his attempts to persuade his dinner partners to join him in the bedroom. His consternation is visible. For their parts, Hyeon-ju and Yu-jeong seem equally uncertain of how to proceed in this foreign setting, flirt without being forceful, and display interest while still playing hard to get. On a day trip away from the city, the girls’ anxieties reach a boiling point. Lost in rural France and frustrated, they both break down—an impotent Sung-nam frets in the backseat, eager but unable to help them find their way.

Stripping his film of all stylistic flourishes, Hong gives this romantic tit-for-tat a naturalistic veneer. And by abandoning all music and most close-ups, Night and Day becomes a detached, voyeuristic glimpse of three timid people working themselves up into a regular sexual frenzy. At night, Hong taps an even more compelling theme. Each evening, after playing nice with the girls, Sung-nam returns home to his boardinghouse to call his wife, still trapped in Seoul. Both speak of loneliness and longing; Sung-nam breaks down in tears, even as he neglects to tell her about his new love interests. This appears to be the real Sung-nam, sad and self-loathing—which makes it all the more shocking when he finally makes the return trip home. Back on the streets of South Korea, talking not to giggly coeds but to his measured wife, Sung-nam’s mannerisms shift from sweet and innocent to arrogant and irritable. There’s a love story here—two in fact—but in Sung-nam’s journey back, Hong proves less than entirely invested in dramas of love or sex. He has larger questions in mind: What makes us who we are? And how much say do we have in the matter?

— S. James Snyder

Night and Day screens October 23–29 at Anthology Film Archives in New York. For more details, click here.