The Bloody Child
Studio: MenkesFilm
Rated: NOT RATED
Release Date: 2007-01-30
Cast: Tinka Menkes, Sherry Sibley, Russ Little (III), Robert Mueller, Jack O’Hara (II)
Director: Nina Menkes
WorkNameSort: Bloody Child, The
The most shocking aspect of this DVD can be found not in the film itself but in the pages of Facets’ included booklet. The film’s director, Nina Menkes, provides her 2004 letter, ‘Sadism: Business as Usual for the U.S. Military,â?� which was rejected by the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, the New Yorker and several alternative publications. This is the first chance most people will have to read this scathing post’Abu Ghraib letter, which reveals the roots of sanctioned U.S. military sadism to have been growing for decades. Menkes provides disgusting examples of military chants (‘cadencesâ?�) dating back to 1984 about rape, necrophilia and baby-killing. Each line will make your skin crawl. At a time when anyone who says anything that can interpreted as critical of the troops is labeled unpatriotic ‘ not to mention the gruesome visuals expressed in the cadences ‘ it’s no surprise nobody published the letter, but its revelations deserve a thorough investigation at the very least.
What does this have to do with The Bloody Child? In an oblique, nonlinear way, the 1996 film is about misplaced military violence, and Menkes discovered the cruel cadences in her research for the movie. The Bloody Child was inspired by a 1990 news brief in a California newspaper about a disgruntled Gulf War veteran who murdered his wife and was arrested while digging her grave in the middle of the Mojave Desert.
In a sense, it’s a familiar subject and landscape for a Menkes film. The experimental filmmaker, like Michelangelo Antonioni before her, has long been fascinated by the simultaneously alienating and spiritual effects of the desert, employing it in her earlier works The Great Sadness of Zohara and Queen of Diamonds. In an interview supplement, she calls The Bloody Child her most fragmented film, and indeed it’s difficult, if not pretentious, viewing. She tells the story of the arrest backwards, intercutting the mundane police procedures with shots of the dead woman’s pale, reborn corpse in a forest, Marines goofing off in a country-music bar, and sequences shot in 16mm in Africa years before The Bloody Child even was conceived. The acting, mostly by nonprofessionals, exudes a documentary-like naturalism, and the staccato editing rhythms change moods and tone with impatient spontaneity.
More characters and settings are slowly woven into the film’s tapestry, and even if Menkes provides us with a memorable impression rather than the whole picture, the grim narrative gradually emerges. She never could have predicted a second Iraq war that would further validate her central point with the incidents at Abu Ghraib and Haditha, but, at least in terms of the belated publication of her letter, her depressing prophecy is our intellectual gain.
This article appears in Feb 14-20, 2007.