A descendant of holocaust survivors and a first generation American, Nina Menkes has, in her 40-plus year working life as a filmmaker, offered a consistent, righteous rebuke to the exploitative hierarchies that her films expose and explore: of male-dominated Hollywood, of management-labor relations in general, of domestic tyranny maintained through violence. This program brings together two of Menkes most trenchant, harrowing works: Queen of Diamonds, per the artist a “painting of the US: an over-enlarged, profit-motivated core surrounded by mute and arid alienation,” starring sister Tinka Menkes as a Las Vegas blackjack dealer, and The Bloody Child, a study in the domestic fallout of American foreign military adventures centered on the arrest for murder of a Marine recently returned from the Gulf War, filmed in North Africa and California’s Mojave Desert region.
