Visual Variations on Noguchi…(M+ Screenings: In the World, Of the World)

Movie Name: Visual Variations on Noguchi
Language: No dialogue
Duration: 4 mins
Director: Marie Menken
Category:I

Made when she was looking after Isamu Noguchi’s studio in Greenwich Village, New York, Marie Menken’s first film became one of the most important works to bridge the pre- and post-war avant-garde, and introduced crucial elements of art practice into experimental film. Her handheld camerawork, extreme framing, high-contrast shadows, rhythmic editing, and unsettling soundtrack produced a film that not only foregrounds Noguchi’s sculptures, but also gives them a new cinematic dynamism.

Courtesy of the Film-Makers' Cooperative

Movie Name: Bridges-Go-Round
Language: No dialogue
Duration: 8 mins Category:I
Director: Shirley Clarke

Filmmaker Shirley Clarke was a modern dancer by training, and her film Bridges-Go-Round is a choreographed duet of dizzying colours, superimposed images, and movement inspired by the bridges of Manhattan. A sort of counter-palindrome, the film consists of a sequence of images played twice, but features two different soundtracks: a jazz piece by Ted Macero and an electronic music track by Louis and Bebe Barron.

Movie Name: Night Journey from Martha Graham: Dance on Film
Language: No dialogue
Duration: 29 mins
Category:I
Director: Nathan Kroll

The collaborative relationship between the artist Isamu Noguchi and the dancer-choreographer Martha Graham was one of the most fruitful creative partnerships of the twentieth century. Noguchi’s sets for Graham’s Night Journey, a ballet inspired by Sophocles’s tragedy Oedipus Rex, demonstrate the strength of the mutual influence between sculpture, space, bodies, and choreography, and how such connections helped to define Graham’s signature performances.

Courtesy of Janus Films