For Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze, the human body is essential to cinema’s ability to advance thought, but the American avant-garde filmmakers Marie Menken, Maya Deren, and Sara Kathryn Arledge go much further in locating thought in embodiment rather than beyond it, even as their films are generally absent from Cavell’s and Deleuze’s writings. For instance, as Menken’s handheld camera emanates with the movements of her body, her fidgetiness expands upon the metaphysical restlessness Cavell describes as essential to thought. Menken’s camera’s immersion in her bodily movements (rather than standing apart from them) joins her work with Deren’s Bergson-inspired films as, for instance, the context of outer space in Very Eye of Night (1952) is impossible to stand outside of or apart from, analogous to Bergson’s notion of the body in the stream. Arledge’s Introspection similarly situates the body where what T.E. Hulme might describe as a ‘complex sense of varying directions of forces’ replaces a sense of distanced sight. While Deleuze pronounces, ‘Give me a body then… The body is no longer the obstacle that separates thought from itself, that which it has to overcome to reach thinking...’ and turns to Antonioni’s, Warhol’s, and Cassavetes’ tired and waiting bodies as exemplary, I argue, it is Menken’s, Deren’s, and Arledge’s dancing, fidgety bodies that perform Deleuze’s epiphany.
application/pdf
2036-461X
16169
34
en
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
‘Give me a body then...’: (In)corporated Thinking in the Cinema of Menken, Deren, and Arledge
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
20
Thematic issue / Section thématique
2020-03-01
2021-09-01
2020-03-11
2024-03-11
Cinéma & Cie
Rebecca A.  Sheehan
2020/03/01
California State University, Fullerton
2036-461X
34
en
‘Give me a body then...’: (In)corporated Thinking in the Cinema of Menken, Deren, and Arledge
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16169/20244
20
‘Give me a body then...’: (In)corporated Thinking
in the Cinema of Menken, Deren, and Arledge
Rebecca A. Sheehan, California State University, Fullerton




Abstract

    For Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze, the human body is essential to cinema’s
    ability to advance thought, but the American avant-garde filmmakers Marie
    Menken, Maya Deren, and Sara Kathryn Arledge go much further in locating
    thought in embodiment rather than beyond it, even as their films are generally
    absent from Cavell’s and Deleuze’s writings. For instance, as Menken’s hand-
    held camera emanates with the movements of her body, her fidgetiness expands
    upon the metaphysical restlessness Cavell describes as essential to thought.
    Menken’s camera’s immersion in her bodily movements (rather than standing
    apart from them) joins her work with Deren’s Bergson-inspired films as, for
    instance, the context of outer space in Very Eye of Night (1952) is impossible
    to stand outside of or apart from, analogous to Bergson’s notion of the body
    in the stream. Arledge’s Introspection similarly situates the body where what
    T.E. Hulme might describe as a ‘complex sense of varying directions of forces’
    replaces a sense of distanced sight. While Deleuze pronounces, ‘Give me a body
    then… The body is no longer the obstacle that separates thought from itself, that
    which it has to overcome to reach thinking...’ and turns to Antonioni’s, Warhol’s,
    and Cassavetes’ tired and waiting bodies as exemplary, I argue, it is Menken’s,
    Deren’s, and Arledge’s dancing, fidgety bodies that perform Deleuze’s epiphany.

   Film-philosophers have long struggled to explain the relationship between
cinema, thought, and the body. From Stanley Cavell’s Emersonian-inspired
writings that lean on classical Hollywood cinema to Gilles Deleuze’s Bergson-
inspired writings that lean primarily on the Post-War Art House, philosophers
have reframed for cinema the age-old problems of skepticism, especially the extent
to which a body is at once inside and outside of the world it views. For instance,
Deleuze conceives of cinema as a ‘membrane which puts an outside and an inside
in contact’,1 while, for Cavell, the camera’s ‘implication’2 reminds us of the ways


1
  Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II: The Time-Image, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 206.
2
  Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 126–27.

                                                    Cinéma & Cie, vol. XX, no. 34, Spring 2020
                                      Rebecca A. Sheehan


in which we are endlessly limited from seeing ourselves in the world, and thus
endlessly distanced from that world (hence that cinema is a ‘moving image of
skepticism’).3 Deleuze and Cavell share a common belief, call it a fantasy, that
cinema might be able to reconcile the divide between subject and world, putting
to rest the worries of skepticism by seizing cinema’s ability to stage encounters with
the world from which, at the same time, the camera’s very distance, its purported
objectivity, reminds us, we stand apart. Compellingly, they share this belief with
a number of central figures of the American avant-garde. Stan Brakhage, for
instance, employs cinema to overcome limitations he perceives of his own body as
he wonders in Metaphors on Vision how many shades of green are visible to a baby
crawling through grass before learning the word ‘green’,4 attempting to answer
this question in Scenes from Under Childhood, or when he fixates on death as, per
Ludwig Wittgenstein, a limit that is not lived through,5 in films like The Dead (1960)
and The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes (1971), or where he contemplates
the limits of his gendered body in films like Loving (1957) and Window Water
Baby Moving (1959). Brakhage’s films are intent on making present an everyday
world to which he has assumed an embodied absence, a pre-ordained distance. In
a similar vein but with a structuralist approach, Hollis Frampton imagines cinema
overcoming the distance and difference between word and world, where

     we may come to visualize an intellectual space in which the systems of words and
     images will both, as Jonas Mekas once said of semiology, ‘seem like half of something’,
     a universe in which image and word, each resolving the contradictions inherent in the
     other, will constitute a system of consciousness.6

   Andy Warhol’s cinema has been similarly theorized by Steven Shaviro and
others as aimed at realizing a closed distance between a body and its image. As
Shaviro argues, Warhol treats cinema as a machine that ‘is already immanent to
the world, rather than a device standing at the transcendental threshold of the
world, and mediating our perceptions and representations of it’.7
   Contrary to thinking of cinema as an apparatus to overcome the body’s pre-
ordained distance from the world it nevertheless inhabits, in diverse but importantly
overlapping ways, the cinema of Marie Menken, Maya Deren, and Sara Kathryn
Arledge, each locate thought in embodiment rather than beyond it. As I will show,
this is a quality that unites their cinema while critically distinguishing it from their


3
  Ivi, p. 188.
4
  Stan Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision, ed. by P. Adams Sitney (New York: Film Culture Inc., 1963),
unpaginated.
5
  See Metaphors on Vision (unpaginated) where Brakhage cites Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-
Philosophicus 6.4311, ‘Death is not an event of life, we do not live to experience death…’.
6
  Hollis Frampton, Circles of Confusion: Film, Photography, Video, Texts 1968-1980 (Rochester,
NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1983), p. 10.
7
  Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp.
214–15.

14
                                   ‘Give me a body then...’


male avant-garde successors whose works, having garnered more critical and
scholarly attention, have come to define the intersections between avant-garde
cinema and philosophy. Indeed, even as this group of 1940s female filmmakers
proved influential on the next generation of male American avant-garde filmmakers
(Brakhage, Warhol, Frampton, etc.), the philosophy of embodiment their cinema
collectively advances seems at the very least to have been overlooked if not
critically misunderstood by that influential generation. Re-examining Menken,
Deren, and Arledge, in the context of film-philosophies of embodiment (even as
many of those have shaped and been shaped by their male avant-garde successors)
has the potential to shift the very philosophical foundations of skepticism-fueled
experiments like those of Brakhage, Frampton, and Warhol, that use cinema
to overcome various perceived divides between the embodied subject and the
world. While numerous films and filmmakers have been put to the service of film-
philosophy’s exploration of the relationship between cinema, thought, and the
body, glaringly absent from these discussions have been these three filmmakers
whose films, especially when taken as a whole, focus so intently on the interfaces
between the body and cinema. While Menken’s cinematography, or what Sitney
has called her ‘somatic camera’,8 constantly resonates with the movement of
her own body, from a different but related angle, the cine-dance experiments of
Deren and Arledge make the cinematic apparatus constantly dependent upon
and emergent from the movement and shape of the human bodies it represents.
That both Menken’s camerawork and Deren’s and Arledge’s cinematography and
editing begins by locating thought in embodiment rather than beyond it raises
paradigm-shifting questions for philosophers following Deleuze and Cavell that
contemplate cinema’s thinking through the body more broadly.
   The embodied nature of the cinema of these three filmmakers is unsurprising
given the extent to which in the at times scant critical writings on them,
descriptions of their films are intertwined with descriptions of their own bodies.
In fact, the attention to the bodies of Deren and Menken included in everything
from anecdotes to some of the only serious analysis and descriptions we have of
a number of their works, is absolutely unmatched when it comes to the bodies
of their male counterparts. In his obituary for Menken and Willard Maas (who
died four days after his wife) in The Village Voice, January 14, 1971, Jonas Mekas
writes of Menken, ‘There was a very lyrical soul behind that huge and very often
sad bulk of a woman, and she put all that soul into her work [...]. Marie’s films
were her flower garden [...] they were all very colorful and sweet and perfect, and
not too bulky [...]’,9 a description with which Scott MacDonald prefaces what


8
  P. Adams Sitney, Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson (Oxford;
New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 23. Sitney opines that the description of the ‘[…]
walking camera or the somatic camera might more vividly convey the identification of the mobile
frame of the ultimately projected image with the movements of the filmmaker’.
9
  Jonas Mekas, Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema, 1959-1971, 2nd edn (New
York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2016), p. 419.

                                                                                            15
                                      Rebecca A. Sheehan


would become the first major description of her work in avant-garde scholarship
(as MacDonald himself notes) where it serves as the first epigraph to the section
‘Marie Menken: Glimpse of the Garden’, in The Garden in the Machine.10 Indeed,
Stan Brakhage frequently describes Menken’s body in the same breath as he does
her work. In a talk delivered in 1992 at the Innis Film Society, he prepares the
audience for a screening of Glimpse of the Garden (1957) by saying that Menken
gets ‘[...] close up on these little flowers that are really overlookable as she must
have felt. She who was so large, but whom the man she really loved saw around
her so often (sic), or overlooked her, as we say’.11 Brakhage begins his chapter
on Marie Menken in Film at Wit’s End, one of the first scholarly considerations
of her work, with this description, ‘When I arrived at the apartment, Marie was
there. She was 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’.12 When Brakhage describes Menken’s ‘free, swinging, swooping hand-
held’ shots, which he credits with ‘liberat[ing] a lot of independent filmmakers
from the idea that had been so powerful up to then, that we have to imitate the
Hollywood dolly shot, without the dollies’, every time he does so he also includes
a description of her body. About the context for the camera movement in Visual
Variations on Noguchi (1945), Brakhage writes, with an impressive degree of
detail for someone who wasn’t actually there,

     So she barreled into Noguchi’s studio with as big a noise as possible and as expansive
     a swinging of the camera, which must have practically disappeared in the enclosure of
     her large, cupped hands, just as Noguchi’s sculptures probably seemed quite fragile as
     she danced among them, turning them this way and that on film.13

   Writing about Bagatelle for Willard Maas (1961), for the filming of which
Brakhage was actually present, he writes of accompanying Menken to Versailles,
‘Imagine this large Lithuanian woman hurling herself into the air with her little,
obviously amateur camera in hand, on the golden gates of Versailles’.14 Thus, just
as he fantasizes a way for cinema to deliver him beyond the limits of his own body,
Brakhage fantasizes that Menken is attempting to do the same (while ascribing
so many limitations to her body), but through these descriptions he ironically


10
   Scott MacDonald, The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films About Place
(Berkeley, CA: University of California, 2001), p. 54. MacDonald begins his section on Menken
by noting, ‘As of 1999 probably no woman who has had as significant an impact on American
cinema as Marie Menken remains as little celebrated. Except for several of her colleagues of the
1950s and 1960s — Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, and P. Adams Sitney — virtually no one has been
interested in assessing her films and their impact on others; and only Brakhage has written as much
as a chapter on Menken’.
11
   ‘Stan Brakhage on Marie Menken’, Film Culture, 78 (Summer 1994), 1–9, (p. 8).
12
   Brakhage, Film at Wit’s End (Kingston, NY: Documentext McPherson and Company, 1989), p.
33.
13
   Ivi, p. 38.
14
   Ivi, p. 46.

16
                                   ‘Give me a body then...’


makes her body as immanent to her cinema as she understood it to be (without, I
will argue, registering it as the hindrance Brakhage did). Brakhage similarly links
Maya Deren’s cinema with her embodiment in his chapter on her in the same
volume, ‘Maya herself possessed a rare intensity [...] I’ve seen big brawny men
— Irish writers or someone just out of the pen — arrive at Maya’s and become
like terrified small children [...]. Not only because she was fierce, but because
she was also incredibly sexy. Ah! Just to shake hands with her was arousing!’.15
Of course, by placing her own body, often as a choreographed dancer, into
her films, it remains foregrounded in Deren’s cinema not as an obstacle but as
part of the means of cinematic expression itself, similarly to the way the body
features in films of another pioneer in cine-dance, Sara Kathryn Arledge, whose
work has received considerably less attention than Menken’s and Deren’s but
who I include in this article for the innovative ways in which she experiments
with collapsing the distance between the body and cinema. Arledge’s work
between figuration and abstraction, painting and experimental cinema almost
always meditates on the body but, similarly to the reception history of Deren
and Menken, her work is often entangled in her biography, one which includes
mental illness and institutionalization. Writing about the Armory Center for the
Arts’ recent retrospective of Arledge’s work entitled Serene for a Moment, critic
Jessica Simmons is right to note, ‘While [...] personal fractures, traceable via
the exhibition’s biographical framing are illuminating, they are also unnecessary.
All too often a woman artist’s biographical narrative governs the discourse
surrounding her work, tainting the ground for more critical readings’.16


The ‘Metaphysical Restlessness’ of Menken’s Camera

   In a register completely contrary to Brakhage’s anxiety about the bodily limits
of his experience and his use of cinema to overcome those, Menken’s willingness
to affirm her presence in her cinema inscribes her own means of visual and
haptic perception into her filmmaking. As Melissa Ragona explains in reference
to Brakhage’s acknowledgment of the revolutionary nature of Menken breaking
free from Hollywood’s dolly shots, ‘The smooth pan that implied the invisibility
of the camera, a seamlessness without human error, was a norm that Menken
challenged [...]’.17 At the time Menken made her Notebook films, the inscription
of the camera (and the embodiment of the person holding it) was as unorthodox
to experimental filmmaking as it was to Hollywood, as P. Adams Sitney notes in

15
   Ivi, p. 102.
16
   Jessica Simons, ‘Sara Kathryn Arledge at the Armory Center for the Arts’, Contemporary Art
Review.la, 21 February 2019, <https://contemporaryartreview.la/sara-kathryn-arledge-at-the-
armory-center-for-the-arts/> [accessed 30 October 2019].
17
   Melissa Ragona, ‘Swing and Sway: Marie Menken’s Filmic Events’, in Women’s Experimental
Cinema: Critical Frameworks, ed. by Robin Blaetz (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007),
pp. 20–44 (p. 20).

                                                                                          17
                                    Rebecca A. Sheehan


Visionary Film, where he examines Menken’s objections to a ‘straight-forward
observational film’, the kind that other lyrical filmmakers (like Brakhage and
Mekas) had made vogue. Sitney refers to the instance where Menken forces
nature’s hand in Rain Drops (1963) (from Notebook) by shaking a branch she’s
filming so that the rain drops fall from it.18 Whereas Brakhage’s films explore the
everyday or what Cavell might have called the ‘missable’ from the standpoint
of overcoming an inherent distance between body and world, transgressing the
limitations of embodied experience and knowledge, Menken’s cinema, by contrast,
celebrates the body’s mediation of the everyday world, refusing to acknowledge
the premise of the problem skepticism poses about the unreachable/unknowable
nature of a world beyond the subject. Her images as they ‘swing and sway’, are
a constant testament to the embodied interface between subject and world. In
Menken’s cinema, there is an important coincidence between the significance of
the ‘ordinary’ as the overlooked material of the everyday (e.g. the raindrop), the
stuff of her notebook, and the material and formal means of cinema that involve
the often un-pictured or undetected body of the cameraperson. This coincident
foregrounding of both previously overlooked everyday images and the often-
overlooked cameraperson underscores Menken’s refusal to even raise the
questions of absence with which skepticism begins; in her cinema, she is always
already in the world and that world is always already in rather than beyond the
embodied perspective of her camera. Where Brakhage reflects upon the limits
of his embodied perception, the problem of the body as either interferingly
asserting itself between the subject’s mind and the world out there (as in the
eyes that can only see certain shades of green limited by knowing the word for
green), Menken’s camerawork embraces the infinite potential (whether clumsy
or graceful, planned or incidental) of encounters registered by the movements
of her camera. This embrace of entanglement between subjective vision and
world is nowhere as evident as it is in the sequence of Menken’s Arabesque for
Kenneth Anger (1958-1961) in which the geometric designs of Spanish tiles take
on the appearance of graphic animation, seeming to dance on their own. That
this animation is produced by Menken’s embodied camera and its interface with
these designs and not through the editing that might have been done if this were
a Hans Richter or Oskar Fischinger film, speaks to the degree to which Menken
has enveloped her body in the production of images rather than attempting
to extract its presence. If, as Cavell claims, cinema offers encounters with the
world that might overcome skepticism — where Cavell turns, for instance, to
Fred Astaire’s (extra) ordinary footwork on a train platform as a demonstration
of cinema making visible the missable — 19 Menken’s hand-held camerawork
makes such encounters more immediate through embracing contingencies that


18
   Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-2000, 3rd edn (Oxford, New York:
Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 160.
19
   Cavell, ‘Something Out of the Ordinary’, in Cavell on Film, ed. by William Rothman (Albany,
NY: SUNY Press, 2005), pp. 238–39.

18
                                      ‘Give me a body then...’


are ever-emergent between the world and both the filmmaker and spectator. In
this way, we might argue that Menken falls within the philosophical purview of
what Richard Rorty called philosophers and poets who ‘recognize contingency’
rather than trying to transcend it, invested in a ‘truth’, or a relation to the world
that is made rather than found.20 Brakhage’s Romantic leanings makes his cinema
inherently strive for something beyond the body, whereas Menken’s cinema is
intent on the creation (rather than discovery) of embodied experiences in the
world.
    In his essay, ‘What Photography Calls Thinking’, Cavell examines what he
calls the ‘camera’s knowledge of the metaphysical restlessness of the live body at
rest’ by turning to a scene in Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) where
the main character, Longfellow Deeds, appeals to ‘the concept of thinking’, ‘the
condition that causes universal fidgetiness’ when he asserts that ‘Everyone does
silly things when they think’.21 Cavell reads this scene in the context of Emerson’s
‘Behavior’ essay, which he sees as ‘an effort to return the mind to the living
body’,22 arguing that

     [...] while thinking is no longer secured by the mind’s declaration of its presence to
     itself [Decartes’ cogito ergo sum], it is now to be secured by the presence of the live
     human body to the camera, in particular by the presence of the body’s apparently
     least intelligent property, its fidgetiness, its metaphysical restlessness. In Descartes, the
     proof of thinking was that it cannot doubt itself, after Emerson the proof of thinking
     is that it cannot be concealed.23

   There is a palpable ‘metaphysical restlessness’ of the kind Cavell describes
in Mr. Deeds’ courtroom scene in Menken’s embodied camera movements, the
quick pans and tilts that refigure Noguchi’s sculptures in Visual Variations, or the
camera’s flighty brush over the flowers in Glimpses of the Garden, what we might
call their Cartesian assertions of the body’s insistent presence. For Menken, the
presence of the body is not ‘to the camera’, but as a premise for the camera’s very
presence, thus the title of Glimpses of the Garden is appropriately analogous to
her own perceptual acts. Here, the declaration of body’s presence refutes that
it could have ever been absent. Cavell’s description of Mr. Deeds ‘taking on the
proof of his own existence, as if against its denial by the world’,24 suggests the
metaphysical stakes of Menken’s hand-held camerawork: the absence of a picture
of the filmmaker’s body in the film implying the world’s denial of the subject
and Menken’s swinging and swaying, the persistent immanence of her hand to
the camera’s motions, as always already present as ‘the proof’ of her ‘existence’.


20
   Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1989), pp. 25–27.
21
   Cavell, ‘What Photography Calls Thinking’, in Cavell on Film, p. 127.
22
   Ibidem.
23
   Ivi, p. 130.
24
   Ivi, p. 128.

                                                                                               19
                                 ﻿Rebecca A. Sheehan


Cavell argues that the camera plays a key role in the ‘course of Deeds’ lecture
to the court, each time [it] follows his attention to a person’s body’s motion,
[and] that person’s reflex is shown to be an attempt to hide the motion’.25 Here,
for Cavell, the camera ‘reveals and records […]’ our knowledge of something
‘fundamental to our existence which we resist’.26 The camera is able to spotlight
our least significant movements, fidgeting and our obliviousness to it or our
oversight which suggests for Cavell our ‘obliviousness to our existence’,27 an
oversight whose possibility Menken’s camera denies through an ‘Emersonian
proof of [...] existence [...] a perpetual visibility of the self’.28
   If Menken’s camera performs this ‘perpetual visibility’, redeeming the motions
Hollywood cinema with its obsession with smooth dolly shots might cut, motions
like those in Mr. Deeds that are represented as the ‘silly things we do when we
think’, it is also performing Emersonian’s ‘aversive self’ through recovering
what society deems unimportant, resisting conformity by making visible and
important the idiosyncrasies of the self. Emerson’s agenda in his ‘Behavior’ essay,
which Cavell describes as ‘return[ing] the mind to the living body’,29 and the
social aversions and non-conformity that blossom philosophically from a cinema
like Menken’s (wherein the mind has never departed the body) find an important
correlation in the work of two philosophers who also suggest the ways in which
Menken, Deren, and Arledge might reshape the foundations of film-philosophy.
First, Cavell’s Emersonian reading of Mr. Deeds bears an important relationship
to Deleuze’s discussion of the role of the body in the transition between what
he calls cinema’s action-image and the time-image, as the latter disrupts the
former’s conformity to the logic of movement and time. Second, the role of the
body in Deleuze’s formulation of the time-image borrows heavily from Henri
Bergson’s interest in recovering ‘life’, and ‘vital phenomena’ from the intellect’s
‘mechanistic theories’ and its interest in matter, in other words, of overcoming
a perceived distance between body and thinking, philosophies that directly
inspired Maya Deren through her study of the English poet and critic T.E.
Hulme. When Deleuze writes, ‘Give me a body then […]’, he notes that this is
‘[…] a formula of philosophical reversal. The body is no longer the obstacle that
separates thought from itself, that which it has to overcome to reach thinking.
It is on the contrary that which it plunges into or must plunge into, in order
to reach the unthought, that is life’.30 Menken’s (and Deren’s) work plunge us
into the body in ways that celebrate that it was never an obstacle but the means
to achieving what Hulme might call ‘intuitive experience’, as I discuss later.
Thus, just as Menken poses a potential revision to Cavell’s premise of cinema’s


25
   Ivi, p. 131.
26
   Ibidem.
27
   Ibidem.
28
   Ibidem.
29
   Ivi, p. 127.
30
   Deleuze, Cinema II, p. 189.

20
                                    ‘Give me a body then...’


philosophy in skepticism (the distance between subject and world), here, we
see another potential for philosophical revision. What Deleuze calls the ‘plunge’
into the body is precisely what distinguishes Menken’s lyrical celebration of her
embodied presence from Brakhage’s desire to use film as a means of overcoming
his body. Since the body locates the sensori-motor logic of the movement-image
for Deleuze, it is unsurprising that the body features so largely in the emergence of
the time-image, particularly the ‘tired’ and ‘waiting’ body, such as those Deleuze
identifies in Michelangelo Antonioni’s films or the ‘everyday body’ of Andy
Warhol’s Sleep (1963) and Eat (1963).31 To these ‘attitudes’ of the body Deleuze
enumerates, Menken’s films suggest one more; the body in motion or the dancing
body, a body which might better accomplish a sense in which the body is ‘no
longer an intermediary’, or an ‘obstacle’, descriptions Deleuze uses to describe
what he sees as a ‘new direction’ in cinema. In fact, Deleuze claims this ‘new’
cinema as the ‘first to mount the camera on an everyday body’,32 but from his
descriptions of Antonioni, Warhol, and Cassavetes (where he sees the everyday
‘gest’ reasserting the body), it is evident that, in these instances he chooses, the
camera stands apart from the bodies it films, even as it meditates upon what these
bodies are doing between eventful or ‘meaningful’ actions that might be the only
pictures of them previously shown in a mainstream film. Indeed, Menken goes
beyond what the filmmakers Deleuze cites do by literally ‘mount[ing] the camera
on an everyday body’, through her handheld work.
   The fact that dance’s intentionality is present-oriented rather than future-
oriented and thus with it the body typically subjected to the logic of the action-
image, is suspended in-between, moving for the sake of moving rather than
moving for the sake of driving the plot, revealing what happens next, makes
Menken’s dancing camera movements ideal for demonstrating the new cinema
of the time-image that Deleuze instead draws upon other examples culled from
‘experimental cinema’ to locate. As with Cavell’s argument that Mr. Deeds uses
cinema to attune us to the body (and its fidgetiness which like Deleuze’s tired or
waiting bodies, is an in-between state that an efficiently event-based narrative
cinema might otherwise overlook, cut, or ignore) as ‘proof of his existence, as
if against its denial by the world’,33 where Menken’s cinema obliterates the very
premise of this denial (through the persistence of her fidgety body that was
never absent from her cinema), we see here that Menken similarly eliminates
the very premise of Deleuze’s ‘formula of philosophical reversal’,34 because her
cinema does not propose a possibility for the body to have ever been separate
from cinema or from its thinking, something into which Deleuze imagines a
‘plunge’.35


31
   Ivi, p. 191.
32
   Ivi, 189.
33
   Cavell, ‘What Photography Calls Thinking’, p. 128.
34
   Deleuze, p. 189.
35
   Ibidem.

                                                                                  21
                                    ﻿Rebecca A. Sheehan


   It is interesting that Deleuze doesn’t examine filmmakers like Menken who
employ hand-held and thus embodied cameras in the context of the ‘new
direction’36 he describes, confining his study of the American avant-garde’s
depiction of the body to Warhol’s long-takes and Geography of the Body (1943)
by Moore and Maas (a film which by all accounts was mostly shot by Menken).
Menken’s interaction with both of these examples seems worth briefly exploring.
We might think of her film, Andy Warhol (1965), as Menken’s commentary
on Warhol and his cinema, but along with her contributions to Geography of
the Body, Andy Warhol teaches us how Menken not only collapses a proposed
or perceived distance between cinema and the body, the representation of a
skeptical divide, but negates and even undoes its very premise. If films like Eat
and Sleep present the ‘everyday body’ in a radical way for Deleuze, they do so
because they collapse the distance between the image of the eventful or important
body and the reality of the everyday body. These films assert the primacy of the
image, reminding us of the ways in which the real is already an image, they thus
collapse the distance between the body and image (what Deleuze might take to
be an act of thinking). By creating a portrait of Andy Warhol in which she uses
fast-motion to produce something that resembles animation, Menken’s response
to Warhol’s cinematic portraits, which themselves use cinema as a machine to
collapse the distance between a body and its image, goes beyond this collapse,
positing that Warhol himself is always already in the machine of cinema, literally
animated by the creation of images. As Ragona notes, ‘Menken turns Warhol
into the mechanical, serial self he always claimed to be (“I am a machine.”)’.37 By
doing this, Menken undermines the very position that postulates a distance from
the machine or the machine’s representation (the image) to be overcome, placing
the artist’s body in the machine just as Menken’s own body always emanates
from her hand-held camerawork. Her film thus ironically suggests that Warhol’s
attempt to collapse the distance between body and image actually recognizes and
reasserts that distance as a premise, something her film undoes by always having
located the artist in the machine. Similarly, Geography of the Body suggests the
obliteration of a distance between body and representation. Through a series
of close-ups, the film offers us defamiliarizing glimpses of bodies that without
the context of establishing shots and set to a poetic voice-over invent fantastic
possibilities for the worlds the parts of the bodies signify. Just as Ben Moore’s
poetry experiments with the different ways in which the body might represent,
exploiting the distance between image and word, Menken’s cinematography,
the use of extreme close-ups but especially her use of a ‘dime store magnifying
glass’38 attached to the camera lens, collapses the very distances playfully bridged
(and thus ironically asserted) by Moore’s elaborate poetic descriptions.



36
   Ibidem.
37
   Ragona, p. 36.
38
   Sitney, Visionary Film, p. 75.

22
                                    ‘Give me a body then...’


     Deren’s and Arledge’s Bodies in the Stream of Time

    Deleuze clearly generates his idea about the body being ‘that which [thought]
plunges into or must plunge into, in order to reach the unthought, that is life’,39
from Henri Bergson’s theories of vital phenomena, or getting beyond the intellect
to ‘life’. Deren was inspired by the same theories through her study of T.E. Hulme
whose notion of ‘intensive manifolds’ borrowed from Bergson’s metaphor of the
‘stream of time’. Bergson suggests the intellectual error of thinking of time as a
stream we stand apart from and view from a distance (from which we can turn
it into the successive parts that constitute the measures of duration, an instant,
a minute, an hour, in other words, from which we can spatialize it), insisting on
the reality that we are always in time, and thus, that we are in the stream, not
standing apart from it. Hulme does not just imagine the subject in the stream, he
imagines the body of the subject in the stream and the interactions between the
body itself and the life flowing around it. Hulme writes,

     If you think of mental life as a flowing stream, then ordinary intellectual knowledge
     is like looking at that stream from outside: you get a clear and perfectly describable
     picture. Imagine now that you are turned into a cross-section of this stream, that
     you have no sense of sight, that in fact your only sense is a sense of pressure. Then
     although you will have no clear picture or representation of the stream at all, you will
     in spite of that have a complete knowledge of it as a complex sense of the varying
     directions of the forces pressing on you.40

   Deren’s The Very Eye of Night (1958) capitalizes on the complex concept of
outer space as a setting that suggests Hulme’s ‘varying directions of the forces
pressing’ on the body as the camera interfaces with optically printed bodies
dancing across numerous vectors of the blackened screen littered with ‘stars’.
Outer-space, like Bergson’s and Hulme’s stream of time, is not something the
body can stand apart from our outside of, rather, it is always already in it. Very Eye
of Night experiments with such a body, opening a variety of three-dimensional
vectors that interrupt our sense of the two-dimensional screen, vectors akin to
Hulme’s ‘varying directions of forces’, through the human bodies of the dancers
that act as a central and universal measure, what we might call a taring device as
we adjust our expectations of their embodied movement to what Deren presents
on screen. Just as we come to depend upon the bodies of the dancers to define
the space of Very Eye’s illusion of depth, Deren uses optically printed images
to challenge us to discern whether it is the body contained by the image which
moves or whether the optically printed image itself is moving through space.
Here, Deren sets up the same attention in the spectator to bodily movement

39
  Deleuze, p. 189.
40
  T.E. Hulme, ‘The Philosophy of Intensive Manifolds’, in Speculations: Essays on Humanism and
the Philosophy of Art, ed. by Herbert Read (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1924), pp.
171–214 (p. 188).

                                                                                           23
                                      ﻿Rebecca A. Sheehan


and the ‘known pulse of an action’,41 as she does with regard to the origin of the
dancer’s movement in Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946) where the slowness with
which the faun character ‘falls’ to the ground makes us wonder about whether
the movement originates in his body or the cinematographer’s manipulation of
the film’s speed. Deren explains her use of slow-motion,

     [...] It is not simply slowness of speed. It is, in fact, something which exists in our
     minds, not on the screen [...]. When we see a man in the attitudes of running and
     identify the activity as a run, one of the knowledges which is part of that identification
     is the pulse normal to that activity. It is because we are aware of the known pulse
     of the identified action while we watch it occur at a slower rate of speed that we
     experience the double-exposure of time which we know as slow motion. It cannot
     occur in an abstract film, where a triangle, for instance, can go fast or slow, but, having
     no necessary pulse, cannot go in slow motion.42

   Thus, bodies are essential to the very expression of much of Deren’s cinema as
without such bodies (e.g. with an abstract film), and our familiarity with them (‘the
known pulse of the identified action’43), we would have difficulty comprehending
the temporality of the images on screen. Indeed, many of Deren’s experiments
with cinematography and editing emanate from and critically depend upon the
body. In Anagram, Deren writes about two instances where she uses the bodies
of dancers to transgress the continuity of space and time in her films. Referring
to an iconic match-on-action sequence in A Study in Choreography for Camera
(1945) where a dancer’s leg begins to come down in a forest in one shot and
in the next continues that motion this time in a living room, Deren claims that
the ‘integrity of the time element — the fact that the tempo of the movement is
continuous...[holds] together spatial areas which are not, in reality, so related’.44
In the second ‘inversely related’45 example, from At Land (1944), Deren claims
to eliminate ‘the spatial indication of the time that has transpired’, and uses
the body of the girl (Deren herself) which disappears over a sand dune only to
reappear in an impossibly short amount of time from behind a dune much farther
away, to allow for a ‘continuity of space’ to ‘integrate periods of time which
were not, in reality, in such immediate relationship’.46 These instances exemplify
the extent to which Deren’s cinema depends upon the body’s interface with the
medium (with the camera, with editing). In each instance, the audience relies on
the movement of the bodies to register that the original limits or rules of space

41
   Maya Deren, ‘Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality’, in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader
of Theory and Criticism, ed. by P. Adams Sitney (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1978), pp.
67–73 (p. 68).
42
   Ivi.
43
   Ivi.
44
   Deren, An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film (Yonkers, NY: The Alicat Book Shop Press,
1946), pp. 50–51.
45
   Ibidem.
46
   Ivi, p. 51.

24
                                   ‘Give me a body then...’


and time presented to us have been transgressed (the forest of Choreography, the
spatial distance between the sand dunes in At Land and the time it would take to
go between them). Without the dancer’s body in Choreography joining through
a match-on-action cut two radically distant spaces, we would simply see a cut
to another location, not a transgression of the body’s experience of the limits of
space. Without the dancer’s body in At Land, we would not register any temporal
compression at all.
   Deren’s films think through the body in the ways Hulme (following Bergson)
imagined as getting beyond the ‘perfectly describable picture’, of ‘ordinary
knowledge’, to accomplish ‘intuition’,47 and Deleuze describes as ‘plung[ing]’48
us into the body. In fact, Menken utilizes the body and what Deren describes as
its ‘known pulse of action’49 to a similar effect with her use of fast motion in Andy
Warhol, a film which is completely dependent upon Andy Warhol’s embodied
movements, where seeing the irregularities with which this jittery body on screen
moves depends upon us knowing how bodies typically move. Making the tempo
and nature of the body’s movements so central to the temporality of the film is
another important way in which Menken and Deren put bodies ‘in the stream
of time’ (implying that they were always already there), making our perception
of their films radically dependent upon the movements of the bodies pictured.
   The ways Deren uses the body as a taring device, a universal register for
determining ‘real’ time, which assumes the premise that a body is always
already in the world (subject to the forces of gravity, and the limitations of its
movements), rather than standing apart from it, forces us to rely on bodies,
our own and those on screen, rather than attempting to transcend them or to
think they are somehow keeping us/distancing us from the world. Similarly, Sara
Kathryn Arledge’s Introspection (1947), ‘the first American abstract dance film’,50
according to David James, defines screen space around the bodies of her dancers
which are visually collapsed into the cinematic medium through a wide-angle
lens (similar to the effect of Menken’s use of the magnifying glass in Geography
of the Body) such that the world this film presents seems positively defined and
organized around these bodies as if they were ‘everything that is the case’,51 much
as Wittgenstein defined ‘the world’ in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus or the way
he defined language, ‘the limits of my language mean the limits of my world’.52
Although, as David James notes, ‘the camera is static throughout’53 Introspection,
the bodies of Arledge’s dancers are never divorced from the camera, they never


47
   Hulme, p. 188.
48
   Deleuze, p. 189.
49
   Deren, ‘Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality’, p. 68.
50
   David James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los
Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 249.
51
   Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. by Charles Kay Ogden (New York:
Harcourt Brace, 1922), p. 25.
52
   Ivi, p. 74.
53
   James, p. 250.

                                                                                           25
                                ﻿Rebecca A. Sheehan


stand neutrally in front of it. Rather, they are contorted through the perspective
of its lenses and through the optical printer that uses them to define alternative
arrangements of the cinematic rectangle just as Deren’s The Very Eye of Night (a
film that came after Introspection) uses optically printing bodies of dancers moving
along competing vectors to destabilize the rectilinear relationships between x, y,
and z axes. Thus, for both Arledge and Deren, cinematic space emanates from
a body that is always already central to it, in a way that is related to Menken’s
organization of her cinema around her hand-held shots, her own embodiment.
It is as if Arledge and Deren through their cine-dance propose that ‘the limits
of their bodies are the limits of their world’ and that their attitude about such
a situation also follows Wittgenstein’s attitude towards language, as their films
present the body not as an obstacle to mourn (as philosophers have mourned
the distance between language and world), to try to overcome (as their male
counterparts have endeavored), but as something whose interface with the world
might produce infinitely new undefined experiences. Their cinema comprises
experiments with bodies we already know rather than imagining that cinema
might bridge body and thought, thus standing us apart from our experience of
the body, perceiving it as both an obstacle preventing us from being in the world
and, like Deleuze, as something which we also don’t yet inhabit.
   Deren’s Study in Choreography for Camera resists the sequential movements
of the body that interested the proto-cinematic motion studies of Marey and
Muybridge (which characterize figures going from one point to another, rather
than not going anywhere, dancing as it were) and which help define the action-
image for Deleuze. Deren uses editing and choreographed bodies in Choreography
and At Land to disrupt the continuity within or between shots and the actions
they picture. The dancer in Choreography who is in a living room for the first part
of his leg’s movement and then suddenly in the woods for the last, and the similar
false match-on-action in At Land where Deren’s feet are on a sandy beach in one
moment and in the midst of the next movement trodding through grass, both tidily
exemplify what Deleuze might call ‘false continuities’ and ‘irrational cuts’,54 and
both radiate from and depend upon the very movements of embodied subjects.
Through its repeated incorporation of figures of circularity and curvature,
Arledge’s Introspection similarly resists sequential, linear movements, which
confront both the logic of the movement-image and the linearity of Bergson’s
stream of time. For instance, the effect of the fish-eye lens itself disrupts the
linear logic of the screen (and the rectilinear arrangement of x, y, and z axes) by
producing curved images, yet another way in which her cinema inhabits the body
which is itself comprised of curves rather than straight geometric lines. At the
same time, many of Arledge’s optically printed bodies and body parts are often
assembled into rotating wheels and circles confronting the rectilinear screen
with a circle as when at the beginning of the film numerous images of a man’s


54
     Deleuze, p. 278.

26
                              ‘Give me a body then...’


head are optically printed to rotate or when optically printed dancers perform
unending pirouettes (layered on one another) or when a wheel of disembodied
arms churn from background to foreground where their hands experience the
extreme curvature of the lens. Such images fundamentally disrupt the causal
motion and progress of the body (as moving from point a to point b) by making
these bodies’ motion one of perpetual return. In terms of theorizing bodies that
create aversions to what Deleuze saw as the purposiveness of the action image or
what Cavell following Emerson saw as the conformity of meaningful behaviour,
Arledge’s use of repetition and circularity might also be held in the same
thought as the actions which Deleuze and Cavell imagined working against these
tendencies (the waiting, sleeping bodies of Antonioni, Warhol and Cassavetes
for Deleuze, the fidgety bodies in Mr. Deeds and the tap-dancing body of Fred
Astaire for Cavell), actions I’ve compared to Menken’s fidgety camera. Menken,
Deren, and Arledge by contrasting the objective view of movement and duration
afforded by Muybridge and Marey, a view that corresponds to philosophies that
conceive of the world as out there apart from us and waiting to be discovered,
challenge this philosophy with one in which the subject is immersed in and co-
extensive with the world whose meaning is made through embodied encounters
with it.




                                                                             27
