The Lioness

Nina Menkes’ trailer for this year’s Viennale is a return to the very basis of cinema, an object of fascination with the world’s beauty. If her most recent feature BRAINWASHED: SEX-CAMERA-POWER (which is part of this year’s program, examines, analyzes and theorizes on the presence of sexism at the core of the cinematic language), this is a practical endeavor of the forming of one gaze of her own, one that is subtle and as close as possible to the environment it observes.
Menkes captures a circus, a space ever present in cinema’s history, a history that this short film...