The following text is an excerpt from the sixth volume of the Viennale's ongoing Textur series, each of which is devoted to the atmospheric craft of a single filmmaker. Textur #6 focuses on the films of Lisandro Alonso; its publication coincides with the Viennale's presentation of his new film Eureka, as well as a festival masterclass.In the excerpt below, the American experimental filmmaker Deborah Stratman explores the sonic palettes and "fugue states of repetition" in Alonso's 2004 film, Los muertos.Los muertos.Besides Queen of Diamonds (1991), Nina Menkes’ sublimely tedious reverie of capital and misogyny, Lisandro Alonso’s 2004 feature Los muertos might be the most transactional film I’ve seen. In each, the largely speechless, impassive protagonists inhabit landscapes from which they, and thereby we, have been dispossessed. The casino tables of Menkes’ blackjack-dealing Firdaus (Tinka Menkes) and the prison yards of Alonso’s inmate Vargas (Argentino Vargas) suspend...
- 10/24/2023
- MUBI
Independent filmmaker Nina Menkes can hardly believe that her new documentary “Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power” about the gendered politics of shot design is causing a stir.
The film is being released in theaters starting Friday via Kino Lorber at the Laemmle in the Los Angeles area and at Dctv’s Firehouse Cinema in New York City, with a national rollout to follow.
“We’ve had a lot of rave reviews, but we’ve also been attacked and it’s unbelievable to me that women would attack this film,” Menkes, who also teaches film production at California Institute of the Arts, told The Wrap. “It’s just like the whole way of cinema being based on these kinds of beautiful, fragmented female bodies seems to be like something people are dying to defend.”
The documentary’s premise is that male and female actors are often shot in very different ways regardless of the context,...
The film is being released in theaters starting Friday via Kino Lorber at the Laemmle in the Los Angeles area and at Dctv’s Firehouse Cinema in New York City, with a national rollout to follow.
“We’ve had a lot of rave reviews, but we’ve also been attacked and it’s unbelievable to me that women would attack this film,” Menkes, who also teaches film production at California Institute of the Arts, told The Wrap. “It’s just like the whole way of cinema being based on these kinds of beautiful, fragmented female bodies seems to be like something people are dying to defend.”
The documentary’s premise is that male and female actors are often shot in very different ways regardless of the context,...
- 10/21/2022
- by Brenda Gazzar
- The Wrap
The Bloody ChildA vast, arid desert, a noisy casino, a sun-lit motel room, a glittering dance floor in a small town dive bar: this is the world of Nina Menkes. Universal spaces made intimate and confined, these locations mark the sites of socialization for the American experimental filmmaker’s wandering, lonely characters. Mostly women, and mostly marginalized by the gaze of a dominant male world, Menkes’ ghostly souls search for community and release in these symbols of rural Americana.With a new documentary, Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power (2022), that premiered at Sundance in January and a retrospective of her restored films hosted by the Brooklyn Academy of Music earlier this month, Menkes has found a fresh spotlight. Despite Brainwashed’s movement away from the filmmaker’s compelling fiction-hybrid work, the opportunity to reconnect with her oeuvre is a welcome one. Exploring gender dynamics and their interplay with sex, violence, and capitalism, Menkes operates in an explictly feminist sphere.
- 4/11/2022
- MUBI
Beginning March 4, Brooklyn Academy of Music (Bam) will host a retrospective of pioneering filmmaker Nina Menkes. The exhibition arrives just after Menkes debuted her latest documentary “Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power” at 2022 Sundance. Exclusive to IndieWire, watch the trailer for the retrospective below.
The week-long Bam retrospective, “Cinema Is Sorcery: The Films of Nina Menkes,” features new restorations of “The Bloody Child” (4K by by The Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation) which premiered at NYFF last fall, and “Magdalena Viraga,” (2K by Arbelos Films) which makes its New York City premiere with the museum.
“Magdalena Viraga” was filmed in bars and hotels in East Los Angeles, following the inner life of a prostitute, played by Tinka Menkes, who is imprisoned for killing her pimp. The 1986 film won the Los Angeles Film Critics Association award for Best Independent/Experimental Film of the Year, and went on to be featured in the Whitney...
The week-long Bam retrospective, “Cinema Is Sorcery: The Films of Nina Menkes,” features new restorations of “The Bloody Child” (4K by by The Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation) which premiered at NYFF last fall, and “Magdalena Viraga,” (2K by Arbelos Films) which makes its New York City premiere with the museum.
“Magdalena Viraga” was filmed in bars and hotels in East Los Angeles, following the inner life of a prostitute, played by Tinka Menkes, who is imprisoned for killing her pimp. The 1986 film won the Los Angeles Film Critics Association award for Best Independent/Experimental Film of the Year, and went on to be featured in the Whitney...
- 2/24/2022
- by Samantha Bergeson
- Indiewire
Phantom Love
"For three decades filmmaker Nina Menkes has made poetic, evocative films that have placed her in the forefront of American experimentalists," writes Kevin Thomas in the Los Angeles Times. "She's a visionary who trusts in the power of image, movement and composition to communicate narrative, meaning and emotion." The retrospective Nina Menkes: Cinema as Sorcery opens at UCLA's Billy Wilder Theater tomorrow with Dissolution, her "most accessible but also most accomplished work."
The La Weekly's Karina Longworth: "In Queen of Diamonds (1991) — my pick for the must-see rediscovery of the program — Menkes's sister and frequent collaborator Tinka Menkes plays Firdaus, a bored, beautiful blackjack dealer at an off-Strip Vegas casino…. Sixteen years later, when Menkes returned to the theme of a statuesque, obsessively manicured brunette sleepwalking through a casino job in the La Koreatown-set Phantom Love, she'd take a tonal and visual U-turn. Phantom's hazy black-and-white cinematography and...
"For three decades filmmaker Nina Menkes has made poetic, evocative films that have placed her in the forefront of American experimentalists," writes Kevin Thomas in the Los Angeles Times. "She's a visionary who trusts in the power of image, movement and composition to communicate narrative, meaning and emotion." The retrospective Nina Menkes: Cinema as Sorcery opens at UCLA's Billy Wilder Theater tomorrow with Dissolution, her "most accessible but also most accomplished work."
The La Weekly's Karina Longworth: "In Queen of Diamonds (1991) — my pick for the must-see rediscovery of the program — Menkes's sister and frequent collaborator Tinka Menkes plays Firdaus, a bored, beautiful blackjack dealer at an off-Strip Vegas casino…. Sixteen years later, when Menkes returned to the theme of a statuesque, obsessively manicured brunette sleepwalking through a casino job in the La Koreatown-set Phantom Love, she'd take a tonal and visual U-turn. Phantom's hazy black-and-white cinematography and...
- 2/21/2012
- MUBI
A good film about the "negative energy" of violence, but with perhaps an unnecessarily thorny title, "The Bloody Child" (at West L.A.'s Nuart) plays a fascinating game with time and point of view, resulting in a powerful experience unlike anything in the marketplace.
This third feature collaboration between sister independents Nina and Tinka Menkes ("Magdalena Viraga", "Queen of Diamonds") is too subtle and surreal for the masses, but for those with the patience, "The Bloody Child" is a masterful exercise in the deconstruction of events that cinematically leads to unforgettable conclusions.
The title refers to the witches' scene in "Macbeth", some lines of which are repeated in singsong snippets by girlish voices on the soundtrack, while on the screen a naked woman lies in a forest and writes mysteriously on her arm.
These unsettling images seem at first totally unconnected to the film's primary story - a young Marine kills his wife and is caught trying to bury the body in the desert by two Marines on patrol. But this inspired-by-a-real-incident plot is fragmented and presented in a documentary style that keeps winding back on itself.
Nina Menkes holds the camera at a distance as the arresting captain (Tinka Menkes), sergeant (Russ Little) and several others talk shop at the crime scene. There are also scenes set in a raunchy country-western bar where the soldiers are seen emoting with the help of alcohol.
Another point of view comes from the murderer (Robert Mueller), who has almost no dialogue but hauntingly evokes the kind of lost soul that can unexpectedly turn homicidal. Menkes many times comes back to an ugly moment when the outraged sergeant mistreats the killer, but she contrasts this kind of reflexive male aggression with the contemplative lover (Jack O'Hara) of the captain.
With the threads running parallel on nonlinear timelines, the North African odyssey of the captain becomes the end point, but the film itself manages to conclude where it began, in the desert of human emotions that remains when destructive energy is unleashed.
THE BLOODY CHILD
A Menkesfilm production
Independent Television Service
Producer-director Nina Menkes
Writers-editors Tinka Menkes, Nina Menkes
Director of photography Nina Menkes
Color/stereo
Cast:
Captain Tinka Menkes
Sergeant Russ Little
Murderer Robert Mueller
Enlisted man Jack O'Hara
Murdered wife Sherry Sibley
Running time - 85 minutes
No MPAA rating...
This third feature collaboration between sister independents Nina and Tinka Menkes ("Magdalena Viraga", "Queen of Diamonds") is too subtle and surreal for the masses, but for those with the patience, "The Bloody Child" is a masterful exercise in the deconstruction of events that cinematically leads to unforgettable conclusions.
The title refers to the witches' scene in "Macbeth", some lines of which are repeated in singsong snippets by girlish voices on the soundtrack, while on the screen a naked woman lies in a forest and writes mysteriously on her arm.
These unsettling images seem at first totally unconnected to the film's primary story - a young Marine kills his wife and is caught trying to bury the body in the desert by two Marines on patrol. But this inspired-by-a-real-incident plot is fragmented and presented in a documentary style that keeps winding back on itself.
Nina Menkes holds the camera at a distance as the arresting captain (Tinka Menkes), sergeant (Russ Little) and several others talk shop at the crime scene. There are also scenes set in a raunchy country-western bar where the soldiers are seen emoting with the help of alcohol.
Another point of view comes from the murderer (Robert Mueller), who has almost no dialogue but hauntingly evokes the kind of lost soul that can unexpectedly turn homicidal. Menkes many times comes back to an ugly moment when the outraged sergeant mistreats the killer, but she contrasts this kind of reflexive male aggression with the contemplative lover (Jack O'Hara) of the captain.
With the threads running parallel on nonlinear timelines, the North African odyssey of the captain becomes the end point, but the film itself manages to conclude where it began, in the desert of human emotions that remains when destructive energy is unleashed.
THE BLOODY CHILD
A Menkesfilm production
Independent Television Service
Producer-director Nina Menkes
Writers-editors Tinka Menkes, Nina Menkes
Director of photography Nina Menkes
Color/stereo
Cast:
Captain Tinka Menkes
Sergeant Russ Little
Murderer Robert Mueller
Enlisted man Jack O'Hara
Murdered wife Sherry Sibley
Running time - 85 minutes
No MPAA rating...
- 10/30/1996
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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