“the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love:” the figural delights of Geography of the Body (1943)

In 1942, Marie Menken, an abstract painter, and her husband Willard Maas, a neo-Romantic poet, took in two wartime strays: an enlisted friend’s camera and George Barker, a British poet and Maas’ sometimes-lover. That summer, the three artists drank, recited poetry, and playing with the camera, began a tongue-in-cheek travelogue film called Geography of the Body (1943). Conceived by Maas, narrated by Barker, and shot and edited by Menken, the seven-minute film features all three of their nude bodies, transfigured into an erogenous landscape. Barker's exoticizing voice-over activates this terrain as if an unfurling game of Exquisite Corpse: matter-of-fact surfaces and textures (hair, ear, scrotum) meet defamiliarized and transformed images (a glistening navel dares to become vulva, become spring-fed valley). Aristophane’s famed quotation from Plato’s Symposium bookends the film, but is it a “whole” these sequences make? Or is this love? This paper situates Geography at the nexus of private intimacies and more “universal” desires by attending to the flesh indexed on screen and the screen made flesh; rather than turning to mythopoetic narrative or symbol, the filmmakers deployed the figure—their figures—to suggest a world both very real and unknowably fantastic. Indeed, they playfully establish what their friend Maya Deren would soon articulate as film’s artistic potential: “recreating relativistic relationships on a plane of intimate experience.” Amid the cultural and political upheaval of wartime New York, these artists mapped the vectors of their daily desires back onto themselves, creating another fleshy plane for others to pursue.