Cinematic Voices
Program in Film and Video Faculty Member Nina Menkes presents her film Hitparkut (Dissolution) (Israel/USA, 2010, 88 min., black and white, sound, 16:9 DCP).
Nina Menkes has completed 7 feature films in which she controlled all aspects of production, including directing, writing, shooting, as well as editing picture and sound on her own productions. Her films have often met with hostility as she confronts and expresses violence in an unusual way, creating and following her own rules. Menkes has referred to herself as a witch, and Dennis Lim, writing in the New York Times, called her a "Cinematic Sorceress of the Self."
"A sustained dark night of the soul, Nina Menkes’
Dissolution plunges into the disturbed mind of a man haunted by his murder of a Tel Aviv pawnbroker. Though not directly adapted from Dostoevsky’s
Crime and Punishment,
Dissolution takes the novel as its mainspring, with Menkes straying as far from the material as befits her engrossing, visually acute and intensely personal filmmaking." -Robert Koehler,
Variety
"Thematically somber but visually luminous,
Dissolution, the remarkable new work from the Israeli-American filmmaker Nina Menkes, explores a soul stained by blood and smothered by loneliness...Here, dreams and reality rub shoulders, and redemption seems as distant as peace itself." -Jeanette Catsoulis,
The New York Times