NINA MENKES REEL with images from THE BLOODY CHILD

Sherry Sibley (now Sherry Avella), who played the murdered woman in The Bloody Child by Nina Menkes, shares her perspective on the film 20 years after it was made. (CLick on link above- REEL contains images from the film, including Sherry as the murdered woman).

Thank you Sherry!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hi Nina:

I wanted to write and just recognize how brilliant you are. WhenI saw that movie as a young person, I didn’t really understand what I was seeing. I think it also helped that I saw your lecture,“Sex and Power: The Visual Language of Oppression”, to understand your directorial choices.

It was so honest. It was truth. I’m shook because its got me internally. It made perfect sense to be presented broken because the people in that movie are broken. All of them. I use the present tense “are” because it’s not a horror flick, disconnected from real life. It is a documentary recorded in real time. Those people we saw are broken.

I don’t know if you knew that the marines would start talking and the things that they would say. When a marine said, “maybe she cheated”, I wanted to yell at the screen that “it’s not o.k.” –I.e. Your spouse cheating is not a reason to kill them.

-In traditional narratives, when women sexually transgress, the rules of our society demand nothing less than capital punishment.

 For example, in Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, and Shahrazad, we see women taking pleasure and then we see then punished. The more pleasure enjoyed by the woman, the more permissibly brutal the death. 
In Madame Bovary, when she is about to be caught, after years of meeting her lover, betraying her husband physically and financially, and abandoning her role as mother, she “greedily swallows arsenic” that she obtains through her ongoing seduction of  the young keeper of the poison. Her character is so corrupt that her death is long and gruesome. In case we have doubts on the corruption of her character, her corpse leaks black bile onto her wedding dress.

In Shahrazad, her actions, and the actions of everyone that enabled her, are so depraved that all of their deaths are extended, bloody and brutal. 
In Anna Karenina, she falls in love and betrays her husband and abandons her daughter. She falls down in front of a train. Her death is quick and tragic. The death of a foolish woman that made bad choices. Her crime was not depraved. It could even be sympathetic but she still had to die.
The effect of traditional narratives manifested in that marine’s authentic response to a dead woman.

-In the traditional linear narrative, when an innocent girl is slain, “the good guy with the gun” dramatically arrests the “bad guy”. The “bad guy” is an aberration that can be contained through the hero’s action. Society is safe but the girl has to be sacrificed to prove it. 

In your film, there is no release. There is no thrill. There is only horror. There is only truth.

I think this movie needs to be seen by everyone. The United States is in eternal war. Young men sign up to be a hero and the unheroic, brutal reality that they experience, when it’s too late to change their mind…I can only imagine what that does to them. 

When this movie was made, teenage men straight out of high school served 1 tour of duty. Not everyone came back as immediately broken as Robert. Now, soldiers can serve 6 or more tours. They serve until they’re shattered.
Thank you for making this film. I hope that it is distributed widely. I hope audiences have the strength to face truth.

Sincerely,
Sherry Avella