Lights

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.