Filmmaker in Focus | The “Cinematic Witch” Nina Menkes

Widely recognized as one of the foremost American independent filmmakers, Nina Menkes captures the reality of alienation and oppression through her (mostly) female characters. Although not documentary in the traditional sense, the 6 films in this DAFilms retrospective show that through Menkes's burning cinematic gaze, she uncovers the societal tensions precisely and unapologetically.

Since the beginning of her work as a filmmaker, Menkes has focused on singular female characters struggling to find their place in the world, often portrayed by her sister and collaborator, Tinka Menkes, while being set in dream-like landscapes of loosely tied narratives (The Great Sadness of Zohara, 1983, Magdalena Viraga, 1986). With an Akerman-like stylistic vision that is very controlled or even choreographed, Menkes's images often linger over scenes of mundanity that only in their lengthiness and repetitiveness uncover the underlying feelings of tension. From the iconic card-dealing shot in Queen of Diamonds (1991) to the ambiguous scenes of sexual intercourse in Phantom Love (2007), passings of time emphasize the lived reality of gender-coded interactions and their performative acts of care.

As an American filmmaker, Nina Menkes reinvents the genre and geographic iconographies of her cultural origins: her films resemble westerns (Queen of Diamonds, 1991) or thrillers (The Bloody Child, 1996), but the way they portray the genre tropes - Las Vegas, the desert, its casinos and murders - feels uncanny and leads to questioning of what appears as familiar. In a similar way, her films set in the Middle East (The Great Sadness of Zohara, 1983; Dissolution, 2012) explore the topographies of Jewish-Arab spaces and the omnipresence of violence in Israeli society: something that Menkes is vocal about both as a filmmaker and as a human, pointing to the darkness that is always present, barely hidden below the volcanic surfaces.

These films are available in North American and European territories (except for Northern Europe).