The Bloody Child
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
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All four films star Menkes’s sister Tinka, who’s also credited as coconceiver and coeditor (there are no writing credits on any of them); Nina is credited as producer, cinematographer, director, coconceiver, and coeditor. As sisterly collaborations, these works, to the best of my knowledge, have no parallel in movies. Tinka Menkes plays different characters in each movie–a Jewish girl who leaves Israel for Morocco in The Great Sadness of Zohara, a schizophrenic prostitute who murders her pimp in Magdalena Viraga, a Las Vegas blackjack dealer in Queen of Diamonds (my favorite Menkes film), and a marine captain in California as well as various undefined characters (or guises of the same undefined character) in northeast Africa in The Bloody Child–and in all of these parts she seems to figure to some degree as her sister’s surrogate or alter ego, making her way through a male-dominated universe. All these films, to varying extents, are feminist documents about pain, and part of my quarrel with them–and with myself–is their tendency to exalt certain aspects of female suffering.
The Bloody Child was inspired by a real incident reported in the Los Angeles Times: a young U.S. marine, recently back from fighting in the gulf war, murdered his wife and was caught trying to bury her in the Mojave Desert by two military policemen on patrol. The arresting officer in the film is the marine captain played by Tinka Menkes, but The Bloody Child doesn’t proceed like a crime story in any ordinary sense; the focus is on the arrest rather than on the crime, which is never shown. We’re also taken into the lives of the captain and other soldiers in the area (29 Palms, the site of the largest U.S. marine base), but not into the life or mind or motivations of the murderer, who’s never heard and is seen only from behind or from a distance. The disembodied voice of the murdered wife is heard periodically (much of what she says comes from Shakespeare’s Macbeth), but she never figures as a character in any ordinary sense–merely as what the production notes describe as a “violated spirit.” In other words, she’s mythologized, along with her husband’s crime, while the husband himself remains unknowable.
The footage shot in 29 Palms, constituting most of the film, is all in 35-millimeter; the footage shot in Africa–done much earlier, long before the concept for the remainder of the film crystallized–is blown up from 16-millimeter. This creates a marked difference in visual texture, and I can’t say that the African footage–some of which dimly recalls The Great Sadness of Zohara–does much to enhance the film. The same goes for the offscreen fragments of Macbeth, which seem to serve as a form of artificial respiration for the central narrative and its thematic and semantic gaps–or at least to inject poetry into a fractured, achronological narrative whose integrity depends in great measure on strategic absences. Because I respect the film’s refusal to explain the inexplicable when it comes to depicting a real-life incident, I mistrust its efforts to import poetry from other places and cultures to paper over the resulting holes. (For similar reasons I regret the injections of passages from Gertrude Stein in Magdalena Viraga, though I revere many of those passages in their own right.) We need those holes to realize where we are in a rocky terrain; Macbeth seems more indicative of where we have been, the African footage indicative only of where the Menkes sisters once were.
