Women, Nasty and Otherwise

Abstract

Leading figures in Hollywood and independent cinema have been making belated efforts to redress the chronic imbalances of power and visibility that have plagued movie screens since they were invented, raising hopes that women and assorted racial, ethnic, and gender minority groups will be more fully and fairly represented in time to come. Home-video distributors are also helping, and a couple of 2023 releases give pride of place to women on both sides of the camera. Cinematic Sorceress: The Films of Nina Menkes (Arbelos) showcases five features and a medium-length short by a radically independent artist who has been pursuing her singular vision since the early 1980s. The silent-film compilation Cinema’s First Nasty Women (Kino Classics) comprises two features and 97 shorts, all made in the United States and Europe between 1898 and 1926. Both collections supplement their main attractions with audio commentaries and other extras, and both are welcome arrivals. Menkes’s two-disc set does not include her most recent production, Brainwashed (USA, 2022), a documentary about the real-world impacts of the objectification and dehumanization inflicted on women by standard cinematic patterns of camerawork, editing, and design, illustrated with scores of excerpts from pictures made as long ago as 1896 and as recently as 2020. It was probably omitted from Cinematic Sorceress because all the other selections are fiction films, but be that as it may, Menkes’s previous pictures provide ample evidence of the determination she has shown in confronting and opposing the built-in gender biases of mainstream cinema. Most of them have starring performances by Menkes’s sister, Tinka Menkes, who has done little acting elsewhere but is obviously on the same idiosyncratic wavelength as her sibling. (I’ll refer to Nina Menkes as Menkes and Tinka Menkes as Tinka hereafter.) Most of them also evince Menkes’s fascination with her Jewish heritage and with spiritual intuitions more generally. The earliest item is The Great Sadness of Zohara (Israel/Morocco, 1983), 40minutes long and a good introduction to the Menkes sensibility, although it’s also the most oblique and attenuated of the films. Tinka plays a wandering woman about whom little can be discerned other than the drastic alienation she evidences throughout the meandering tale, during which she frequently looks into the camera in ways that are sometimes accusatory, sometimes complicitous. The picture begins in Israel, moves to Morocco and other Arab lands, and returns to Israel for the conclusion; here as in other films, Menkes places her fictional protagonist in a documentary setting, directing the central performance while allowing the on-location action to unfold as it would if she weren’t there with her camera. The soundtrack hums with mingled and generally incoherent voices blended with music by the avant-garde composer Luciano Berio, producing what Menkes calls a “psychic cacophony.” In her audio commentary, she says that Zohara’s journey may or may not be a spiritual quest, and that she undergoes