Nina Menkes

Nina Menkes is a woman filmmaker who has completed six feature films in which she controlled all aspects of production, including directing, writing, shooting, as well as editing picture and sound on her own productions. She has worked in various media including Super-8, 16mm, 35mm and lately HD. Her films have often met with hostility, as she confronts and expresses violence in an unusual way, creating and following her own rules.. Menkes has referred to herself as a witch, and Dennis Lim, writing in the New York Times, called her a "cinematic sorceress of the self." According to film critic and historian Berenice Reynaud: "[Menkes] does not inscribe herself in a recognizable avant-garde tradition, she has no master and no disciples, which forces her to reinvent the history of cinema in her own terms, to struggle alone with formal and conceptual issues. This loneliness – both æsthetic and economic – is also embedded in the texture of the work. Yet, it is not the cliché loneliness of the romantic victim – it is more akin to the “night of the soul” evoked by the mystics, Dante’s travel though a dark wood – or the heroic solitude of the knight-errant.

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