‘The Mechanics of Love’: Willard Maas and Ben Moore’s erotic suggestions
Within the landscape of the American avant-garde, the husband-wife duo of Marie Menken and Willard Maas were central figures who influenced the conversation in multiple ways. Throughout the 1940s and the ’50s, both Menken and Maas became major voices in New York City’s artistic circles, which were responsible for ushering in new sensibilities to American art. In fact, their friend Andy Warhol once provided the perfect description for them: “the last of the great bohemians”.
While Menken’s filmography often gets a lot of attention from scholars and film fans, Maas also worked on some fascinating cinematic projects that deserve recognition. Ranging from Narcissus to Andy Warhol’s Silver Flotations, Maas’ approach to experimental filmmaking had its own distinctive style, which led to alternate forms of artistic expression. It’s particularly interesting to compare them with Menkens’ films because, in some ways, they are in conversation with each other.
One particularly influential work from Maas’ oeuvre is The Mechanics of Love, directed alongside Ben Moore. Often referred to as a “film poem”, it’s an interesting experiment that plays around with the idea of the erotic. Beginning with visions of two lovers poised at the precipice of passionate lovemaking, the film substitutes the images of sexual activity with fleeting glimpses of everyday objects – either from their bedroom or their daily routines.
This substitution is particularly riveting because it examines the complex frameworks of the montage theory. By planting the seeds of the erotic in the audience’s mind, all kinds of common objects adopt sexual connotations in our minds despite the fact they are completely non-sexualised within their environments. Fruits appear voluptuous, boiling water has a sensual energy to it, and even keys resemble phallic imagery.
The Mechanics of Love uses its montage to prove that the cinematic experience can facilitate the germination of certain thoughts only through suggestion, creating an intense chain that speeds up with each subsequent psychosexual association. It’s a remarkable continuation of the work started by the Soviet theorists during the silent film era, making us wonder what other associations we could have made if the starting point was different.
Accompanied by a zither score by John Gruen, this 1955 work isn’t just important because it picked up where Maas’ predecessors left off but also because it laid down interesting possibilities for the future. From the imagery of the voluptuous fruits that would become widely accepted in our current era of emojis to the usage of visual substitution during sexual scenes (mostly used for comic effect in modern films and shows), The Mechanics of Love is a real gem.
Watch the film here.
