Lights (1966) User Reviews

Okay experimental film

[Horst_In_Translation · 4/10 · 13 May 2016]

"Lights" is a 6-minute short film from exactly 50 years ago. The writer and director is American avant-garde filmmaker Marie Menken. The title is very true here, this little movie is about colors and bright lights on a black background. It occasionally reminded me of Stan Brakhage's works. I thought it was a solid watch and my rating is only that low because I subjectively am not a big experimental film fan. But I still believe it succeeded with what it wanted to achieve. It's probably even a greater watch when it's dark outside if you switch off the lights, a bit like a night sky perhaps. All in all, I recommend this one to experimentally film lovers. Everybody else can skip it.

Epiphany

[p_radulescu · 10/10 · 11 November 2019]

Menken finished the work at this 6 minute film in 1966, and terms like augmented, or virtual reality would come decades later; and just such terms of nowadays would come to mind when watching Lights; in other of her movies (like in her 1944 Visual Variations of Noguchi, for instance) she was exploring the objects trying to make them active parteners in the play; here in Lights it's different; Menken gives up any effort to show us the reality she films; here she goes beyond the world of the objects to find out something more fundamental; here the effort is to surpass even Plato's cave, so to speak; and the result is an epiphany.