By MCN Editor editor@moviecitynews.com

The Most Prolific Female Filmmaker You’ve Never Heard Of: NINA MENKES NY & LA FILM RETROSPECTIVES

Posted Tuesday, December 20th, 2011 - 1 Comment »
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Los Angeles: February 18 – March 7, 2011; New York: March 9-16, 2012

Anthology & UCLA Film Archives partner to celebrate the work of Nina Menkes

Menkes’s latest film “Dissolution” to receive one-week theatrical run in NYC concurrent with retrospective

A filmmaker who has broken cinematic ground on multiple levels and has completed six feature films in which she controlled all aspects of production, Nina Menkes has created works that have been met with hostility nearly as often as they’ve incited praise and admiration. Anthology and UCLA Film Archives will be partnering for a bi-coastal celebration of her films with a New York & Los Angeles career retrospective. Alongside showings of her past works, Menkes’s most recent feature, DISSOLUTION, will be playing the full week of the NYC retrospective.

The Menkes retrospective will be held in March 2012 at the Anthology Film Archives in New York and the UCLA Film Archive’s Billy Wilder Theater in Los Angeles.

Nina Menkes “has remained one of the few American directors whose feature films – in both form and thought – are genuinely radical. Menkes’s main preoccupation across her seven films is violence in all its forms, and her approach, oblique yet intuitive, has yielded results that have more to say on the subject than any American director since Peckinpah or Cassavetes.” [LA Weekly, June 2011]

Menkes has produced, written, directed, shot and edited her own features, for many years working closely with her sister Tinka Menkes, who was both her lead actress and creative collaborator.

Her films have shown widely in major international film festivals including Sundance, Rotterdam, Locarno, London, Viennale, San Francisco, Edinburgh, Cairo, Toronto as well as at La Cinematheque Francaise, The British Film Institute, the ICA in London, the Beijing Film Academy in China, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, MOCA and LACMA in Los Angeles. Menkes’s many honors include a Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, an Annenberg Foundation Independent Media Grant, an American Film Institute Independent Filmmaker Award, three Western States Regional Media Arts Fellowships and two Senior Fulbright Research Awards–one to the Middle East/North Africa, and one to India.

The retrospectives will feature eight of Nina’s films, including her two early short films–A SOFT WARRIOR (1981), documenting a serious illness suffered by Tinka as experienced by Nina – in which Tinka plays Nina- and THE GREAT SADNESS OF ZOHARA (1983), which traces the solitary, mystical journey of a Jewish girl , also played by Tinka, who leaves Jerusalem for Arab lands. The latter film won awards at the San Francisco and Houston International Film Festivals and was named “One of the Decade’s Best Films” by director Allison Anders.

The sisters collaboration continued with MAGDALENA VIRAGA (1986), shot in East Los Angeles, about the inner life of a prostitute, imprisoned for killing her pimp. The film received the Los Angeles Film Critics Association award for “Best Independent/ Experimental Film of the Year,” and was featured in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Biennial and in over 40 other international film festivals. Filmed on location in Las Vegas, QUEEN OF DIAMONDS (1991) revolves around the life of an intense, alienated blackjack dealer, played by Tinka Menkes. The film was listed as one of the Year’s Ten Best in the Los Angeles Times and Film Comment.

THE BLOODY CHILD (1996) is a mesmerizing look at the desolation of violence. Inspired by a real event – a US Marine, recently back from the Gulf War, was found digging a grave for his murdered wife in the middle of the California Mojave. Her last film with Tinka and considered by many to be her most radical, THE BLOODY CHILD was described in the Los Angeles Times as “an awe-inspiring, rigorous work of art on the highest level.”

In 2002, she shot and co-created a feature length, experimental documentary in Beirut, Lebanon, MASSAKER, about the Sabra and Shatilla massacre, which premiered at the Berlinale in 2005 and received a FIPRESCI Award.Switching to black and white photography in a work that Variety described as “Pure cinema- not since Bela Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies has black-and-white looked so stunning”, PHANTOM LOVE (2007) is a powerful psychodrama about a young woman trapped within a suffocating family.

Loosely inspired by Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, shot in modern-day Tel Aviv, and also in black and white, DISSOLUTION (2010), Menkes’ most recent film, combines an almost surreal fairy-tale energy with brutal realism to explore the condition of violence which permeates contemporary Israeli society. The film marked her first work with the Israeli David Fire, a musician and philosopher, who played the lead role as well as collaborated with Menkes on writing and editing. The film won “Best Israeli Drama” at its premiere at the Jerusalem International Film Festival in July 2010.

Menkes is currently in development on a new feature, HEATSTROKE, executive produced by Gus Van Sant, and set to be shot in 2012 in Cairo, Egypt and Los Angeles.

The complete lineups for the Anthology Film Archives and UCLA retrospectives will be announced in December. Menkes will be present in both cities to participate in discussions after the screenings of her films.

New York Schedule — Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue, New York NY 10003

Dissolution: Friday March 9 at 7:00, Saturday March 10 at 4:30, Sunday March 11 at 3:00, Monday March 12 at 7:00, Tuesday March 13 at 7:00, Wednesday March 14 at 9:00, Thursday March 15 at 9:00

The Bloody Child: Friday March 9 at 9:00, Sunday March 11 at 7:00, Thursday March 15 at 7:00

The Great Sadness of Zohara: Saturday March 10 at 3:00, Sunday March 11 at 9:00

Magdalena Viraga: Saturday March 10 at 6:30, Monday March 12 at 9:00

Queen of Diamonds: Saturday March 10 at 8:30, Tuesday March 13 at 9:00

Phantom Love: Sunday March 11 at 5:00, Friday March 16 at 7:00

Massaker: Wednesday March 14 at 7:00, Friday March 16 at 9:00

Los Angeles — UCLA Film & Television Archive, Billy Wilder Theater, 10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90024

Schedule TBD

**

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Posted in Movie City News, Press Releases | 1 Comment »

One Response to “The Most Prolific Female Filmmaker You’ve Never Heard Of: NINA MENKES NY & LA FILM RETROSPECTIVES”

  1. nina says:
    December 20, 2011 at 3:20 pm

    thanks ray 🙂
    come see the movies on the big screen!

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon