Marie Menken. Andy Warhol, 1965. Frame Enlargement. Photo Courtesy

Top: Marie Menken. Andy Warhol , 1965. Frame enlargement. Photo courtesy of Anthology Film Archives. All rights reserved. Bottom: Marie Menken. Arabesque for Kenneth Anger, 1961. Frame enlargement. Photo courtesy of Anthology Film Archives. All rights reserved. 58 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.36.58 by guest on 26 September 2021 Myth, Matter, Queerness: The Cinema of Willard Maas, Marie Menken, and the Gryphon Group, 1943–1969 JUAN A. SUÁREZ The Gryphon group has had an uneven reception history: well-known and well-regarded in experimental film circles during its active years—the mid- 1940s to the late 1960s—it suffered an eclipse in succeeding decades and now seems poised for a return, as recent publications, conferences, and film programs begin to assess Gryphon’s place in the history of avant-garde cinema. The group’s core members were Marie Menken and her husband, Willard Maas. Among those who worked under the Gryphon imprint are Ben Moore, Charles Boultenhouse, John Hawkins, and Charles Henri Ford. And on the outer edges of the collective were Gregory Markopoulos and Stan Brakhage. Maas claimed them as members and they allowed their work to be connected with the group but did not feel strongly committed to it. 1 The list of Gryphon’s friends and collaborators makes up an impressive cross-section of the postwar avant-garde, and includes filmmakers Norman McLaren, Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, and Andy Warhol, poet and film - maker Gerard Malanga, critic Parker Tyler, Living Theater founders and directors Julian Beck and Judith Malina, the British poet George Barker— a protégé of T.S. Eliot—and musicians Ben Weber, Alan Hovhannes, and Teiji Ito, Maya Deren’s husband. “The Gryphons,” as Maas often called them, stand between the boomlet in experimental film after World War II and the underground explosion of the 1960s. Their careers stretched through the intervening decades and reg - istered—at times prompted—the transitions from the trance film of the 1940s to the lyric and mythopoetic styles of the 1950s and into the early 1960s pop underground. In addition, they gave all these modes a distinctly queer inflection. In many ways, the Gryphon group is a bridge between the homoerotic films that Kenneth Anger and Curtis Harrington made in Los Angeles in the immediate postwar years and the full-blown queer bashes of Flaming Creatures (1963), Scorpio Rising (1963), and Warhol’s Factory. Historians of avant-garde film have cursorily dealt with the work of the Grey Room 36, Summer 2009, pp. 58–87. © 2009 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 59 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.36.58 by guest on 26 September 2021 group, and particularly of its founders and longest-standing members, Maas and Menken. Only Stan Brakhage has been amply studied, but not as a con - tributor to a collective that he clearly exceeds. Between the mid-1950s and the late 1960s, the Gryphon productions were reviewed in Film Culture— most often by Parker Tyler—and in Jonas Mekas’s “Movie Journal” column in The Village Voice. In addition, Maas and Menken were the subjects of a special issue of Filmwise, a small-circulation journal edited by P. Adams Sitney and Ken Kelman. 2 Afterward, they are mentioned in the standard works on the American experimental film—by Tyler, Sitney, Sheldon Renan, Dominique Noguez, Marilyn Singer, and David James—and they have been the objects of biographical essays by Brakhage. 3 However, there are no comprehensive analyses of the group as a whole and of its significance to the cultural scene of its time. Sitney, Scott Macdonald, and Melissa Ragona have recently published important work on Menken. 4 Macdonald reads her as a practitioner of the landscape film. Sitney inserts her in a current of Emersonianism that traverses American avant-garde cinema. Ragona, work - ing in part against Macdonald, Sitney, and Mekas, rejects the view that Menken’s films are primaril y diaristic and lyrical and demonstrates that Menken’s driving motivation was to transpose drawing and sculpture into a time-bound medium; in the process, Menken delved into the materiality of film and employed chance operations and game-based processes in a way that brings her close to Fluxus and pop art. Thorough and insightful as they are, these analyses isolate Menken’s work from the communal context in which it emerged, eliding her ongoing dialogue with Maas and skimming over the role that (queer) sexuality and affect play in her films. To remedy these omissions, this essay describes the social contours of the Gryphon group, focusing on how the relationships of its members flowed into their films, and will subsequently analyze Gryphon’s output, especially Maas’s and Menken’s, by studying two poles of their aesthetics: myth and matter. Myth is a structuring principle and a conduit for queer content and appears most frequently in Maas’s work. While his films also register the materiality of the world and of the body as meaningless excretions that refuse conceptual reduction and the ordering power of myth, in Menken’s oeuvre “matter” is rigorously explored. Her material interests are not con - fined to the exploration of cinematic or other artistic languages but also shape her personal perception of the everyday and contain a view of desire and sexuality that it is important to take into account. Community In one of the few essays on Maas, Tyler characterized Gryphon’s working methods as making art “out of and with one’s own friends.” 5 This is common 60 Grey Room 36 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.36.58 by guest on 26 September 2021 in avant-garde milieus, where work is often collaborative and instigated by personal attachments; it was particularly true of Maas and Menken, whose films frequently arose from their friendships and loves. Maas and Menken came from strikingly different backgrounds and arrived at film together almost by chance. Menken was born in 1909 (1910 by some accounts) in Brooklyn to a Lithuanian immigrant family. She studied at the New York School of Fine and Industrial Arts and at the Art Students’ League and ended up working as a secretary to Hilla Rebay, first director and curator at the Museum of Non-objective Painting (later renamed the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), in order to support her work as a painter. In 1936 she received a Yaddo Foundation Scholarship that took her to upstate New York, where she met Maas, another grant recipient. Maas was born in 1907 in California to well-to-do parents of German descent. After graduating from San Jose State College, he moved to New York to pur - sue an M.A. in English at Columbia University and shortly afterward became known as a poet and editor. Maas and Menken married in 1937. After 1942 they were employed by the animation division of the Army Pictorial Service, part of the Signal Corps. Maas wrote scripts and checked anima - tions, and Menken drew (she contributed to the cartoon Bonds for Bullets ). While they worked for the Signal Corps, they witnessed the making of a film by their friend Guy Glover, Norman McLaren’s boyfriend at the time. The experience proved decisive to their careers. 6 In a memoir published in 1963, Maas dates the origin of the Gryphon group to McLaren’s stay in New York in 1940. McLaren and Glover had fled England, as had many other pacifists, including W.H. Auden, in order to avoid the oppressive regimentation of private life during wartime. 7 Shortly after arriving in New York, McLaren walked into the Guggenheim Foundation, where he met Menken. McLaren received some financial aid from Rebay, who also supported the work of other abstract animators such as John Whitney, Jordan Belson, and Harry Smith. 8 McLaren and Menken quickly became friends. One has to read between the lines of Maas’s mem - oir, but it seems that there was an ill-fated love story between McLaren and Maas, possibly involving Glover as well. Maas called Glover “the brain in the ménage.” 9 Was it a ménage à trois or à quatre (because Menken brought McLaren into Maas’s orbit)? In any case, the story did not end happily. When McLaren left New York to join the National Film Board of Canada, just founded by John Grierson, Maas tried to follow. He sent Grierson a script, hoping to be hired by the board as a writer but never was, owing, it seems, to McLaren’s underhanded opposition. Maas wrote “100 or so poems to Norman after this,” then stopped writing poetry altogether for over twenty years: “It was too painful,” he said. 10 Suárez | Myth, Matter, Queerness: The Cinema of Willard Maas, Marie Menken, and the Gryphon Group, 1943 –1969 61 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.36.58 by guest on 26 September 2021 The affair had at least one positive outcome: “If there were no NMcL, there might not have been a film Group,” Maas wrote. 11 The group did not formally exist until the mid-1950s, when Menken registered Gryphon Productions on a Christmas bonus from her job at Time-Life. By that time, however, they had already been acting as a loose collective for over a decade. 12 Their first production, Coney Island (1942), was an unreleased “practice film” credited to Maas. 13 Their second title, Geography of the Body (1943) became one of the most widely screened experimental films in the postwar years.

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