Nina Menkes interview

Nina Menkes is an independent American filmmaker making experimental films since 1981, such as Queen of Diamonds (1991) or Massaker (2005). Her official website can be found here. She kindly visited our blog recently and agreed to answer to the questions of Jit Phokaew (Limitless Cinema) and Filmsick, who reviewed her latest film Phantom Love (2007) at the 2008 blogathon. The interview was held by email on August 5th 2008.
Note: A great interview by David E. James is available at Senses of Cinema, as well as a detailed article, Nina Menkes: The Warrior and her Jiang Hu, by Bérénice Reynaud.

Marina Shoif as Lulu in Phantom love

• UNSPOKEN CINEMA : Thank you, Nina, for agreeing to talk to us. Let me tell you I've enjoyed your latest film very much. In PHANTOM LOVE, there are very few dialogues, especially in the casino scenes. What do you think about the role of dialogue in films? Do you always use little dialogue in all your films? Would you say that this small dialogue in PHANTOM LOVE corresponds to the journey of a woman into her own self? Or maybe is it related to the alienation portrayed in your film(s)?

NINA MENKES : Yes, there is very little dialogue in all my films. Some films have a bit more than others, but in general, I stay away from dialogue, because I feel that the most powerful energies in our lives, and in fact, the way we actually pick up information and feelings about ourselves and other people is not through words, but through energy and other levels of connection. Words can be powerful and meaningful, like poetry, for example, can be so moving, but just talking,chatting “dialogue”-- usually, its waste of time, in my opinion, and also, it covers up deeper levels of reality.

• Why did you choose the heroine of PHANTOM LOVE to be an employee at a casino? Could you tell us about the inspiration that motivated this choice? I find the boring life of a casino job very interesting for at least two reasons: firstly because the casino is usually a place of excitement in most films, but in this film it is a place of extreme boredom; secondly because most filmmakers seem to portray the boredom of modern life via stereotypical characters (like for example corporate office employees), but it is different in your film. Was this contrast intentional?

For me, the casino is an intense symbol of extreme alienation for a few reasons.

It is labor with no product. Basically in a casino, people are losing money as entertainment. The worker, just takes your money and you don’t get anything at all. I guess you get a thrill. But actually, this thrill will pass and what did you get? Even if you buy a cheap sweater at K-mart, you got a sweater. You can wear it in case you are cold. At the casino, the money drains into the pocket of someone else and there is no return. And the casino is so outside time. In Vegas there is no natural light and no clocks inside the casinos which are open 24/7. So its hell.

To me, it’s a perfect picture of hell. Visually, I like it too, because of the numbers.

The numbers are connected with Death. “His number was Up” in slang English can mean-- he was killed. Money is counted. Counting in general is from the devil…it’s a known fact, that counting is connected to death. People sometimes like to know how old I am, but I don’t like to count, how many days have I been on planet earth? How many days are left? This is not for us to know. The Bedouins in Sinai, where I lived for some months, years ago—they don’t know when they were born, so they don’t know their age. Its very liberating. The numbers constrain you, they tie you down, they limit perception. God is infinite and cannot be counted.

• The editing in your films is most peculiar : discontinuity between places, backgrounds or positions. What is your intention? Why are the narratives in your films so fragmented in such a way?

My editing is based on psychic continuity, not material or physical continuity. All the connections in terms of editing are in terms of the flow of feelings and psychic energy. I purposely dislocate the viewer in terms of physical or geographic material space and so called normal counting of minutes and time. Instead all the connections are on the psychic level.

• I am very interested in the temporal dimension of your films, and in the universe portrayed in your film. Could you tell us about the perception of time by your characters?

This connects to the above questions, in terms of counting, and time is normally “counted” in a very specific and linear way. This way of counting time and arranging time and space, which is the conventional way, is 1) not interesting to me , but more than that—I think its also not True. When I was in India some years ago, I had a dream that I was wearing two wrist watches. One on each hand. And each watch had two hands, and both of the hands, in both of watches were spinning wildly counter-clockwise. When I woke up, I told a swami, whom I met on the road, about my dream, he said :

- “Oh…sure…you have contacted the reality that is outside time and space.”

So, anyway, we have our way of organizing time for “normal life” and we need it, if we have to meet someone at 3 o’clock, okay we both have to know what is 3 o’clock, but the part of ourselves where things are happening most powerfully is not associated with these numbers. Psychoanalysts know that our adult sexual relationships are probably almost always driven by what happened when we were, say, 5 years old right? And that is alive and vibrating inside us, the Buddhists always say that past present and future are all co-existent, its obviously true.

Recently I came to Israel and one of my friends from long ago found me, we had not seen each nor talked or written each other for 20 years. This is a very special friend, but anyway, we found each other and it was as if less than 20 minutes had passed, since our last meeting. Twenty years was nothing. Zero.

My characters are located on the level of time and space where intense emotions are existing in an unadulterated state, a state not compressed by ordinary social reality.

• In PHANTOM LOVE, it seems the spirits of different human characters are connected to different kinds of animals. What is your concept behind this?

I feel very connected to the animal world. The different animals have different energies and powers. I know the Native American Indians in North America were very tuned into this aspect of life, but in our modern life we don’t have so much connection to the animal world, but to me, animals are somehow sacred, they are closer to God than we are, although a friend recently told me “I am God too”, not only this bird, or this tiger, but me, a man. Yes, that’s true too, but somehow we are corrupted by our loss of connection to the sacred. In fact, my films are essentially and ultimately about precisely this loss of connection.

• I feel there is something spiritual about PHANTOM LOVE. Could you tell us your personal thoughts on spirituality or about the spirituality you've put in this film?

Yes, its what I was trying to say just now. There is a connection, its not feelings or intellect. There is a sacred whirlpool in the area right below or around the heart chakra, between the breasts, at least, a close friend was speaking of this whirlpool this morning and I burst into tears, I felt it was so small in me, and I pray it can become from a tiny little bud stronger and more open. My films are about loss of connection to the spiritual. And the pain that comes from that loss. The alienation in my films is ultimately about that. The spiritual alienation then vibrates on all levels. But that is the root alienation.

• The mother-daughter relationship in PHANTOM LOVE is quite shocking for me. What inspired you this particular relation?

Its an image of an incestuous relation. But it’s a dream. Lulu has a dream that shows her what has happened to her on an energetic level…. that all her boundaries, her most private and the most intimate areas of herself, have been invaded and violated in a terrible way. She has to refuse this invasion.

• Why filming PHANTOM LOVE in black-and-white rather than in color?

I don’t have an answer, it was an intuition, it felt right to me. Color would have been too much. The film is so rich, it could not have in addition to the rich content, also COLOR, that would have been too much.

• Could you tell us about your next project? What are you working on currently?

I have a script called HEATSTROKE, and I hope to find the right actresses for it...

It is about two sisters, like PHANTOM LOVE, but it is in color. I am looking for a producer for this film at this time, and I welcome any help or suggestions you might have.

Here is an official little “blurb” about my new film:

HEATSTROKE is a mirage-like mystery set in Los Angeles, California and Cairo, Egypt during the feverish heat of a contemporary summer.The film's root is a violent -- possibly sexual -- early trauma that sits in the psychic closet of two sisters .The film sets the psychic split of the sisters and the violence within their family against the violent split between the Arab world and the West.

I thank you deeply for your understanding and appreciation of my work.

Now Showing (3)

Read part 1 and 2 of this review.

Then, as the image (and sound) quality improves (along with the audiovisual technology history of recent years), the importance of the scenes also matures and becomes more meaningful. This naturally follows the education of a (fictional) filmmaker learning from experience to channel the enthusiasm and only shoot what might stay interesting when watched on TV for a viewer unrelated to this family.

Rita has grown up too, she's over 16 in the second epoch, and her concerns change from kidding around, playing with the neighbours, witnessing family drama from the sideline, to moving outside the house, meeting new friends and arguing with her boyfriend. The (fictional) apprentice filmmaker also moves outside family environment and films the city, composes better shots, plants his camera in a static position with a meaningful point of view. So the film really tells at once the evolution from the 90ies to the present days of Rita (from a child to a woman), of the filmmaker (from amateur to professional) and of our culture of images (from VHS to DV), through subtle understated changes that become evident afterwards.
A few years back, Jonathan Caouette brought to Sundance and Cannes 2004 (Director's Fortnight) a similar experiment with Tarnation (2003), with his own video-diary he had been recording since his early teen with 8mm film then video. It was a frantic flipbook through the mutation of images in the last decades, albeit not contemplative like Raya Martin's.

After the Black & White break (grand mother's film), we jump in time a few years later. Another girl impersonates Rita in her late teens.

Rita's adolescence opens with a creepy hand-held first person view (coming out of a Blair's Witch Project!) through a night trip in a graveyard. She's there to set a commemorative supper on her family tomb (I assumed it was her grand mother's but apparently it's her father's), next to a rooster chanting dawn.
The idea is beautiful, but less is the overdramatized thrill (with artificial sound-effects added) overstating her anguish to get lost (the camera searching for a way out) or be stalked by ghosts (the camera pans left and right nervously). The long take works well for the whole duration of the ceremony, but the way in (subjective POV) and the way out (frontal tracking shot), with the jerky hand-held camera, gets a little redundant after a while. From what I could see, this labyrinthine cemetery offered a magnificent space in itself with very natural architectural qualities that would render a spooky feeling by night even with a calm filming.

Follows a powerful long take. The new (older) Rita doesn't utter a word in the cemetery, so it's the first time she introduces her voice to us here. Out on her front porch, she's having a chat with her best friend and two boys at night. The filmmaker is removed in a corner like a static surveillance camera, at table level, and we overhear their stream-of-consciousness conversation. There is an unspoken tension, they are trying to be clever, taunting and mocking each other, awkward moments defused by a lot of laughters. We have the genuine feeling of watching real life teenagers filmed with a careful attention.
They joke about the circumstances of the suicide of a neighbour, like a trivial gossip. However disrespectful, it confronts them to the theme of death, which seems to touch an underlying existential concern among clever jokes. The girls whisper on their own about another gossip of a raped neighbour. The boys want to hear out loud the secret talks and are most uncomfortable when finally finding out. This rape topic digresses into other various subjects like the lust of some chicks with bad reputation, boobies, the insecurity in Manila and announces (tangentially) the turning point of the family drama finale. But for now, it will remain just a suspended hint in the back of our heads...

The film moves on to a more continuous form, slowly building some kind of a narrative, hint after hint, collected unconsciously in every scene. As Rita patiently looks after a DVD shop in a mall for a friend, her boyfriend Doy comes along to take her out for dinner. It's the occasion of nice extended takes of daily life observation, in the street, and in the mall.
There is a very interesting shot of Rita and Doy arguing about Rita's mum not wanting Rita to sleep over at Doy's for his birthday. Raya Martin films this long take from across the street looking at the couple seated right behind a large window pane in a bar at dusk. We can't see their facial expressions from there, we even have to assume the identity of these small silhouettes. But we can hear what they say clearly with a microphone recording the ambient sound behind the window. It's an interesting way to dissociate the visual and auditive channels. We decipher their body language from afar, and try to figure out what the drama is about from a dialogue that is not scripted to feed a "plot".
We are put in the position of an involuntary voyeur, the kind of curiosity we've all experienced when sitting for a long time in a public space, where we get to capture the personality of the strangers around us and by overhearing certain conversations we peek into their intimacy either by our own speculations or by being witness of their indiscreet exhibition.
Rita doesn't want to confess that her mum forbids her, so she brings up false excuses that her boyfriend doesn't understand. Doy feels offended she's not more enthusiastic to spend the night with him for his birthday. The unspoken conflict arrested by self-censorship or timid shame, Rita just walks out, and Doy sighs in incomprehension. This is a common teenage case of failure to meet between opposite gender, complicated by the family rules.

Another favourite scene of mine, develops this situation most pertinently. Rita and her mother are watching an offscreen TV in the living room at night. This could be the mirror scene of the horror radio program. This time they are not cuddled up together because teenage is a period of generational conflict and emancipation. The affection expresses itself elsewhere.
Rita is crouching in the armchair and her mother is lying in the sofa and asks Rita to bring her food from the kitchen. Rita plays nice and chit-chats attentively until she mentions in passing that her best (girl)friend's birthday is the next day and she invited her to stay overnight for helping to the preparations. What she doesn't tell her mum is that Doy's (her boyfriend) birthday is the following day (a coincidence we heard about, understated, in the scene where the four friends talk under the porch). Her mother accepts while giving severe recommendations to her minor daughter against the danger of being raped, echoing another topic evoked in that preparatory scene. Rita smiles with a large grin when she obtained the "proxy" permission to go out with her boyfriend, since her mum looks away at the TV, and agrees to whatever she's asked to promise, further aggravating her little lie.
All the mise en scene revolves around the fact they talk without looking eye to eye, and the dissimulation of information that makes the spectator first anticipate the dreaded reaction then projects us in the next scenes to come.

Part 4 (coming soon)

Now Showing (2008/Martin)

Now Showing (2008/Raya MARTIN/Philippines/France)
Cannes 2008 - Quinzaine des Réalisateurs

Read part 1 of this review here

I was actually shocked to learn the film was entirely scripted and staged (shot in 6 days, edited from 40 hours of footage) because I totally believed I was watching Raya Martin's personal homemovies compilation dating back as far as the VHS era. The staging involved was, in my mind, the kind a member of the family would direct informally by requesting the "protagonists" would pretend the camera is not there, and keep doing what they naturally do everyday, sharing confidences like if nobody was listening. Though there are a few "extras" who occasionally look into the lens when the scenes require a larger crowd foreign to the household.
I could easily picture myself the evolution of a family-movie collection where the subjects learnt over time not to pay attention anymore to that boy in the corner with his camcorder constantly on. There is this very immediate feeling of proximity and integration of the camera in these slices of genuine life permeating from this strange immersion within Rita's family. She's named after Rita Hayworth for the same reason Camilla Rhodes names herself Rita in Lynch's Mulholland Dr. (2001), an homage to the timeless silver screen diva.

The first "epoch", in the nineties, with images (as if) from a cheap VHS [Hi8] camcorder, Rita might be around 10 years old (when a distant relative came for her birthday asks her her age, she doesn't answer). The visual aspect shows the amateurish jerky framing of an inexperienced filmmaker filming around for his entertainment and for collective family memories, excited about the smallest things, catching whatever comes in front of the camera, recording family reunions in a discontinuous way. We see random street shots at night, a ball game down in the neighbourhood alley, Aunts' arguments, Rita's Birthday, poetically rendered mundane whereabouts. All rings true, real life experiences both in the content (script) and enactment (non-actors), which is a prowess in itself.
It also includes home-made stop-motion animation with toys, which every teenager with a camera would do.

In her bedroom, Rita jumps on the bed and performs solo "karaoke" songs, but the sound is curiously erased. Maybe it's just to avoid copyright fees because even the a cappella "Happy Birthday" song is off (which is a song notoriously known to be copyrighted whereas it should belong to the worldwide public domain by now!)
Though we don't really miss it given the atrocious sound quality of this epoch. Raya Martin explained he duplicated the footage numerous times on purpose with low-grade equipment to artificially generate the quality loss endured by VHS tapes when watched over and over, to give a sense of distant worn out past.
I was compelled to view it with the patience and compassion we grant to a document close to our heart, and completely overlooking after a while the VHS statics and the grating noises. There is this strange captivation focusing our attention on the reality happening rather than its distorted appearance on screen, like for example for a sonography, a decayed silent film or the uncomfortable peeping through a keyhole...

One of my favourite scene is a static extended long take of Rita and her mother watching [listening to] a late horror program on TV [radio]. The camera is so positioned that we are looking at them sideways (framing the entire sofa [bed]), their faces bathed in the pale glow of the offscreen TV set. Rita seems tired and is cuddled up against her mum, she doesn't even look at the screen, but she listens to the frightening voices from the movie (like us, blind spectators) [radio program]. Her mother is amused by the silly sound effects, the threatening narrator, and the wincing faces of her daughter. Both are less than riveted by the show, and probably only stay there just to be together in a silent communion.
This is the kind of intimate moment with zero plot drive that gives contemplative films their unique realism. The significance of this scene could emerge from its cumulative combination with other mundane moments. We gather that Rita's father is constantly away for work, that she misses him even if this emotion remains repressed as evoking his absence is a sore subject. This mother-daughter moment condenses alone all the unspoken sedimentary tension in a "single-parent" nucleus family.
I think the horror show is also quite a clever psychoanalytical symbol for the lack of masculine education in the house. The father figure being there to help the child overcome fears and to nurse self-confidence. The attitude of Rita towards this exposition to horror reveals her juvenile regression in this respect, which incarnates the absent father in a scene where he's not even mentioned.

We also overhear that Rita's grandmother used to be a famous Filipino movie actress in her youth, before the news of her death closes Rita's infancy segment with another beautiful scene on the beach at dusk. Rita cries and dark silhouettes move around a boat on the sand, maybe the return of the estranged seaman father for the funeral. But I might have missed a subtitle line and misinterpreted the succession of events because Cahiers says it was the father's funeral...
The following interlude would be more significant in my opinion if it was an homage following the death of the grand-mother.


A structuralist interlude divides the film between the nineties and the present days, with an insertion of Black&White found-footage of the grandmother's movie. Even though it's a sound film from 1939 (see details in Oggs Cruz review), the sound is off (but the collage of clips is so random that we couldn't follow the dialogues anyway). It's like a best of collection of screen moments from her career. We see her in various scenes and dresses. The image is artificially altered by multiple copies of copies across different support, from 35mm to VHS [Hi8] to digital. Pushing the texture of the image to extreme contrast, as if going back in time to early silent film decayed by bad storage. This reminds Tscherkassky's aesthetics of found footage experiments. Raya Martin plays the footage (in a much quicker montage than the other parts full of long plan-sequences) alternatively backward, upside down, back to front or in slow motion... which appropriately convokes the vanishing impression of fragmentary memories, like a nostalgic foregone era, fading away relentlessly. This is the film-within-the-film that really questions the perceived reality of TV imagery.

[EDIT: correction made for the radio horror show I mistook for an offscreen TV show]

Part 3 continues here

Raya Martin in Cannes 08

In his video interview for Cahiers, Raya Martin explains that Now Showing (2008), this 4h40 long film is the first episode of a new "trilogy" called Box Office (Now showing, Next Attraction, Coming Soon). If this doesn't blow your mind coming from a decidedly ambitious 23 years old filmmaker, wait for his two other trilogies already planned for future developments.
A Short Film About Indio National (2006) is the first of a trilogy following the foreign occupations of the Philippines (Spanish, American, Japanese), which recreates "pseudo-found-footage" of cinema made during these different periods. This one reminds the similar narrative structure used by Hou Hsiao-Hsien in Three Times (2005), to tell the story of historical occupation of Taiwan in three periods (1966: American occupation, 1911: Japanese occupation, 2005: Independence).
His second, more autobiographical trilogy started with Autohystoria (2007), now followed by Possible Lovers (2008) which premiered in the Buenos Aires Film Festival.

If I was short of ideas about this film (and if I had seen all his films), I would go on about this sprawling preconceived "trilogy" mindset, especially that early in a career, like if filmmaking was such a steady job you could actually project yourself in three simultaneous series of films without worrying if the success of the current film will make you able to even make another film... The trilogy used to be the theoretical device of critics who identify it within a finished oeuvre, now it seems the filmmakers writes their biography ahead of time... [Is he some kind of George Lucas?] I'm only joking. I'm impressed how Raya Martin answers intelligently and most confidently to Cahiers critics' (Renzi & Thirion) uninspiring questions. (here is their review in French)

Indeed this film (Now Showing) is amazing. It is actually a trilogy in itself, recounting the pseudo-documentary life of a young girl, Rita, living in Manila, in three epochs. Cahiers loves this work because it's a quintessential evidence of their dubious theory on "Cinema Subtil" that nobody can explain. In fact it uses the digital technology to re-enact a staged documentary where the uneven quality of images tells the recent History of our audiovisual culture recorded on magnetic storage. We can appreciate how video ages in a different way than celluloid. And the film shows the aesthetic leap from VHS to HD digital in family-movies. In this regard it does represent perfectly the identity crisis of images. Especially since it is an artificial reconstitution of archival material, it questions the reality of TV imagery, like other contemporaries filmmakers do (Redacted, Cloverfield, REC...) This is an issue that fascinates the Cahiers team for a couple years now.

Personally I admire it for its "contemplative" tendency. To each its own...

part 2, part 3...

Interview with Kunal Mehra director of "The Wind Blows Where It Will"

HermyBerg: First I want to say thank you for taking the time to talk to me, Kunal. This is a wonderful opportunity.

Kunal Mehra: Pleasure's mine. Glad that it all worked out.

HermyBerg: I wanted to start by saying I think you made a really excellent film here.
A film I hope others will be able to see soon.

Kunal Mehra: Thanks! It's always nice to meet people who took a liking to the film.

HermyBerg: First I want to start broadly with how you found your lead actor Josh Boyle.

Kunal Mehra: Craigslist is the word.

HermyBerg: Ha!

Kunal Mehra: I had put up audition calls for pretty much everything - cast/crew/catering/producer - on CL and believe it or not, found pretty much 95% of the cast/crew on there.

HermyBerg: That's interesting.

Kunal Mehra: It took me a while to find the character for Philippe, though. I had it narrowed down to 3 actors and I spent quite a lot of time just informally chatting with them, trying to get a sense of how their persona in real life is like.
Josh seemed to fit the bill perfectly.

HermyBerg: I agree. And your cinematographer Aron Noll?

Kunal Mehra: Craigslist. I had put up an ad on CL a few years ago for a film that I never really made. Aron responded to that ad and even though I never made that film, we kept in touch, so when I wanted a DP for TWBWIW, I got in touch with Aron right away. Thankfully enough all the scheduling worked out and he was on board.

HermyBerg: And what camera did you shoot with?

Kunal Mehra: Panasonic DVX100. Probably more detail than you asked for, but we started shooting with dvx100a (which is what Aron owned). The next day, one of the crew members offered to lend us his brand new dvx100b (which had 16:9 anamorphic mode) for the shoot. We shot with that for a week before a freak accident happened in which a bicyclist tripped over the camera and totaled it. I paid the crew member for that camera and rented another 100b from a local store for the rest of the shoot.

HermyBerg: Now that’s a story. Ouch.

Kunal Mehra: Yeah… it was painful. Ironically, I had insurance for everything other than equipment. C'est La Vie.

HermyBerg: Smart man. So What is your background? Where did you grow up? Go to school?

Kunal Mehra: I grew up in India in a small town (Aurangabad) that's about 200 miles east of Bombay. My undergrad was in electronics and after a brief internship in Singapore, I moved to Cincinnati, Ohio for my Masters in computers in August 2000. A couple of years and some celestial alignments later, I found myself in the rainy Pacific Northwest in Portland, Oregon, working for Intel, which is where I'm working as of now.

HermyBerg: And your influential filmmakers and/or films?

Kunal Mehra: It's hard to pin influences down on any one artist since, in my opinion, the creative process is continuously being nurtured as one observes and learns, with influences and inspiration abounding all around us and seeping into our consciousness without our being necessarily conscious of it. That being said, if I had to take names: the intoxicating pessimism of Bergman, the keen insight and sheer prolificness of Fassbinder, the Zen'ism of Ozu, the surrealism of Tarkovsky, the stark and ascetic minimalism of Bresson, the fluidity and humanness of Renoir and more recently, the keen eye of Hou Hsiao-Hsien.

When it comes to films: I would definitely put Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman and Bela Tarr's Satantango as a couple of direct influences on the writing/editing of TWBWIW. Other indelible works: Fassbinder's Why does Herr R. Run Amok, Herzog's Aguirre, Bresson's Gentle Woman, Karoly Makk's Another Way, Sokhurov's Mother & Son and Confessions, Ozu's Tokyo Story, Imamura's Ballad of Narayama, Jean Vigo's L' Atalante.

Read the entire interview here.