Raindrops; Greek Epiphany; Moonplay; Copycat; Papercuts; Lights; Nightwriting; The Egg; Etcetcetcetc. In a remarkable series of disarmingly unpretentious films she demonstrated a rhythmic inventiveness perhaps previously unmatched in the cinema. In Notebook she stored fragments from all phases of her filmic career, from the mid-forties to the late sixties. There we can see how, at a time when most of her contemporaries were invoking the Dionysian imagination in their invented imagery, Menken was exploring the dynamics of the edge of the screen and playing with the opposition of immanent and imposed rhythm. The exquisite early Raindrops dramatizes the subtle wit of her vision of the perceptual model. As she waits behind the camera for a drop of rain on the tip of a leaf to gather sufficient mass to fall, we sense her impatience and even anxiety lest the film will run out on her; so an unseen hand taps the branch, forcing the drops to fall. Tampering this way with an otherwise straightforward observational film is characteristic of Menken, who cheerfully incorporates the extraneous reflection of herself and her camera, even her cigarette smoke, into an animated fragment and who makes the very nervous instability of the hand-held camera a part of the rhythmic structure of several films.

P. Adams Sitney from Visionary Film, Oxford University Press, pp.160-161