Didi Fire plays a desperate man in Menkes’s haunting DISSOLUTION
DISSOLUTION (Nina Menkes, 2010)
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
March 9-15
212-505-5181
www.anthologyfilmarchives.org
www.ninamenkes.com
“For me, cinema is sorcery, a creative way to interact with the world in order to rearrange perception and expand consciousness — both the viewer’s and my own,” says master filmmaker Nina Menkes. A citizen of Israel, Germany, and the United States, Menkes has made only six feature-length films and three shorts over the course of thirty years but has established an international reputation that deserves to be more widespread in America. On the occasion of the U.S. theatrical release of her latest film, Dissolution, Anthology Film Archives is holding a retrospective of Menkes’s career, following a festival held last month at her alma mater, UCLA. Shot in an Arab section of Tel Aviv and loosely based on Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Dissolution is an intense psychological drama seething with an inner violence that is ready to explode at any moment. Didi Fire, who cowrote and coedited the film with Menkes, stars as a deeply troubled Israeli man desperate for money. The film opens with Fire gently nudging a snail with his foot, the imminent threat of his stomping on it readily apparent. Soon he is furiously sharpening a knife, obsessively timed to a ticking metronome. “There are no rules in this world. Misfortune is not punishment, nor is good luck a reward,” he later tells a friend “All meaning is barren. . . . This world has no core, except that core which has shattered.” After committing a brutal murder, he, like Raskalnikov, is left to deal with the guilt that is ravaging his soul. Shot in sharp black-and-white with a handheld digital video camera and featuring Menkes’s first male protagonist, Dissolution is a haunting tale that is as much about one man’s journey as it is about the violence and unrest that permeates throughout Israel. Named Best Drama at the 2010 Jerusalem International Film Festival, it is a powerful morality play that never preaches at the audience, instead telling its story slowly and determinedly as it unfolds in a world of scorpions and spiders, ghosts and inner demons. Dissolution is running at Anthology daily March 9-15, along with screenings of such other Menkes works as The Great Sadness of Zohara (1983), Magdalena Viraga (1986), The Bloody Child (1996), and Phantom Love (2007). As a bonus, Menkes will be on hand to talk about her career at select screenings.
Set in a seemingly postapocalyptic world that is never explained, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker is an existential work of immense beauty, a deeply philosophical, continually frustrating, and endlessly rewarding journey into nothing less than the heart and soul of the world. Alexander Kaidanovsky stars as Stalker, a careful, precise man who has been hired to lead Writer and Professor (Tarkovsky regulars Anatoli Solonitsyn and Nikolai Grinko, respectively) into the forbidden Zone, a place of mystery that houses a room where it is said that people can achieve their most inner desires. While Stalker’s home and the bar where the men meet are dark, gray, and foreboding, the Zone is filled with lush green fields, trees, and aromatic flowers — as well as abandoned vehicles, strange passageways, and inexplicable sounds. The Zone — which heavily influenced J. J. Abrams’s creation of the island on Lost — has a life all its own as past, present, and future merge in an expansive land where every forward movement is fraught with danger but there is no turning back. An obsessive tyrant of a filmmaker, Tarkovsky (Andrei Rublev, Solaris) imbues every shot with a supreme majesty, taking viewers on an unusual and unforgettable cinematic adventure. On March 10 at 5:00, the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU and the Illustration Program at Parsons are teaming up to present “Tarkovsy Interruptus,” a free screening of the film that will be stopped at several points for commentary from what is being referred to as a “a distinguished panel of Tarkovsky fanatics,” including Geoff Dyer, Walter Murch, Phillip Lopate, Francine Prose, Michael Benson, and Dana Stevens. The program is being held in conjunction with the publication of Dyer’s latest work, Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room (Pantheon, February 21, $24). For more on Dyer, who will also introduce the screening, you can read our twi-ny talk with him 
Kim Ki-duk has made a number of excellent films, but Bad Guy is not one of them. Instead, it’s a preposterous, painfully puerile, and deeply misogynistic movie that is insulting from start to finish. Although it’s only a hundred minutes long, it feels like a thousand. Won Seo stars as Sun-hwa, a college girl who gets conned by Han-ki (Cho Je-hyun) into becoming a prostitute to pay off a false debt. He watches her transformation through a two-way mirror while one of his henchmen, Myung-soo (Choi Duk-moon), thinks he has fallen in love with her himself. Lots of sex and violence ensue, most of which makes no sense and is as unbelievable as the premise. The evening concludes at 7:30 with Kim’s 2008 Dream, a tale in which two people’s dreams intersect.
