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The Bloody ChildA vast, arid desert, a noisy casino, a sun-lit motel room, a glittering dance floor in a small town dive bar: this is the world of Nina Menkes. Universal spaces made intimate and confined, these locations mark the sites of socialization for the American experimental filmmaker’s wandering, lonely characters. Mostly women, and mostly marginalized by the gaze of a dominant male world, Menkes’ ghostly souls search for community and release in these symbols of rural Americana.With a new documentary, Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power (2022), that premiered at Sundance in January and a retrospective of her restored films hosted by the Brooklyn Academy of Music earlier this month, Menkes has found a fresh spotlight. Despite Brainwashed’s movement away from the filmmaker’s compelling fiction-hybrid work, the opportunity to reconnect with her oeuvre is a welcome one. Exploring gender dynamics and their interplay with sex, violence, and capitalism, Menkes operates in an explictly feminist sphere.