NFR Project: 'Glimpse of the Garden' (1957)

NFR Project: “Glimpse of the Garden”

Dir: Marie Menken

Premiere: 1957

5 min.

Marie Menken (1909-1970) was an experimental artist, a kinetic painter, and a pioneer of making cinema out of something as simple as a handheld camera. Not only handheld, but hand-cranked – a 16-millimeter Bolex.

Already established as a painter, she picked up a camera and began messing around with it in the mid=1940s. She produced Visual Variations on Noguchi in 1945; she would make 18 films all told through 1968. She taught Andy Warhol how to use a handheld camera. Stan Brakhage was inspired by her work.

Glimpse of the Garden is just a poetic meditation on the subject of the film. Purposely crude in technique, accompanied acoustically only by birdsong, the camera sweeps, pans, and runs alongside a field of varied flowers. In closeup, petals and stems glisten with rain. The film races, swoops, pauses, examines, and runs on. The film’s clarity is not strong; there are under- and over-exposed pieces, a rough hand-hewed feel. But in a scant five minutes, Menken delivers the evocation of a certain place on a certain day.

The film has no agenda. Its blunt simplicity celebrates the flowering world. It’s Whitmanesque. It preserves some sunny and quiet moments forever. Maybe that’s enough.

The NFR Project is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Hunters.