Synopsis
Created during the brief, illuminated Christmas season, Lights was made between midnight and 1:00 a.m., when vehicular and pedestrian traffic was minimal, over a period of three years. The work draws on store decorations, window displays, fountains, public promenades, the lights of Park Avenue, and the facades of buildings and churches. Due to near-freezing temperatures, filmmaker Marie Menken kept the camera beneath her coat to keep it warm during shooting.
A word from Tënk
To watch Lights by painter and filmmaker Marie Menken is to let oneself be carried away by a choreography of light, to experience the enchantment of its abstract pictorial quality, and to surrender one’s body to the mobility of a camera whose gestural language has often been compared to that of action painting. But to watch Lights is also to merge with the night in which it was filmed. Bringing together images shot during the holiday season from 1964 to 1966, between midnight and one o’clock in the morning—a moment of calm and reduced traffic—Menken’s experimental nocturne inscribes moving light onto film, gradually turning it into an autonomous subject, freed from the decorative Christmas lights that initially serve as its pretext.
Yet rather than seeing this merely as a stage in the aesthetic formation of a cinematic field seeking to emancipate itself from imposed dictates, I also like to think that this film, in its ritual dimension and its symbolic connection to contemplation, and through its very craftsmanship in opposition to consumerism, gestures toward a particular experience of the night. That of those who cannot afford to gather in warmth, with family or among friends; that of those who know the phenomenology of the night and its lights better than anyone else, whose gazes—rich yet silent, unrecognized—await our hands, our help, our attention.
Maude Trottier
Editor-in-Chief, Hors champ magazine
