Phantom Love, the most recent 35mm feature by Nina Menkes, one of Los Angeles’s leading independent film artists, makes its New York premiere at MoMA. Since her first short, The Soft Warrior (1981), Menkes has completed several impressive works, including one medium-length film, The Great Sadness of Zohara (1983); four features, Magdalena Viraga (1986), Queen of Diamonds (1991), The Bloody Child (1996), and Phantom Love (2007); and the interactive CD-ROM The Crazy Bloody Female Center (2000). Menkes’s dreamlike work depicts the interior life of women struggling with issues of domestic constraints and/or violence, and describes voyages in search of self. Her richly nuanced films are distinguished by luminous, surreal, and often disturbing imagery, and accompanied by soundtracks that are carefully modulated to suggest the simultaneity of the psychological and outside worlds.
Organized by Laurence Kardish, Senior Curator, Department of Film.