Hands in the machine: Maya Deren and Marie Menken’s manual gestures

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dc.contributor.authorWalton, Saige
dc.contributor.editorWalton, Saigeen
dc.contributor.editorCrispino, Lucioen
dc.date.accessioned2022-07-15T08:09:28Z
dc.date.available2022-07-15T08:09:28Z
dc.date.issued2022
dc.description.abstractIn this article, I examine how Maya Deren and Marie Menken’s mid-1940s filmmaking enacts a gestural aesthetic. Drawing on Vilém Flusser’s thinking on gesture (his discussion of “moving tools” and the thoughtfulness of hands), I draw attention to the importance of hands in Deren and Menken’s work. In Visual Variations on Noguchi (1945), Menken employs a handheld Bolex camera to explore the different material properties of art objects. Through her sweeping camerawork, film editing and sound, she transforms Noguchi’s art into new, cinematically stuttering, borderline abstract compositions. In At Land (1944), Deren’s unnamed protagonist (played by Deren herself) is filmed reaching, touching, clasping and grasping her way through a highly mutable world. In Deren’s re-working of the mythic quest narrative, hands function as a gestural, thoughtful means of adaptation. Hands also provide Deren with a manual means of manipulating “film form”, of manually piecing together different surfaces, shots and scenes. In Visual Variations on Noguchi and in At Land, both artist-filmmakers use their “moving tools” to transform human gesture. Through their foregrounding of the hands (onscreen and offscreen), Deren and Menken enact a desubjectified, gestural cinema.en
dc.description.statusPeer revieweden
dc.description.versionPublished Versionen
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdfen
dc.identifier.citationWalton, S. (2022) 'Hands in the machine: Maya Deren and Marie Menken’s manual gestures', Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, 23, pp. 32-51. https://doi.org/10.33178/alpha.23.02en
dc.identifier.doihttps://doi.org/10.33178/alpha.23.02
dc.identifier.endpage51
dc.identifier.issn2009-4078
dc.identifier.issued23
dc.identifier.journalabbrevAlphavilleen
dc.identifier.journaltitleAlphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Mediaen
dc.identifier.startpage32
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10468/13369
dc.language.isoenen
dc.publisherFilm and Screen Media, University College Corken
dc.relation.urihttp://www.alphavillejournal.com/Issue23/HTML/ArticleWalton.html
dc.rights© 2022, the Author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.en
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
dc.subjectMarie Menkenen
dc.subjectMaya Derenen
dc.subjectVilém Flusseren
dc.subjectGestureen
dc.subjectExperimental film aestheticsen
dc.titleHands in the machine: Maya Deren and Marie Menken’s manual gesturesen
dc.typeArticle (peer-reviewed)en
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Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media. Issue 23: Screening the Artist: Between Presence/Absence, Immediacy/Mediation