Independent film-maker and academic Nina Menkes turns her merciless female gaze on the deep-rooted sexism of cinema in Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power. Expanded from a live lecture that Menkes first delivered in 2018 in various settings, including the Cannes and Sundance film festivals, this polemical documentary uses clips from almost 200 films to illustrate how women are routinely diminished, objectified and sexualised on screen. Almost the entire history of cinema, Menkes claims, is “propaganda for patriarchy”, creating and maintaining oppressive power structures that are passively adopted by men and women alike. Female film audiences, she argues, are “seduced into powerlessness by glamour.”
On paper, Brainwashed may sound like an arid and joyless exercise, covering fairly well-trodden ground to anyone with even casual feminist sympathies. But Menkes makes this material fresh, compelling and timely, using the flood of revelations unleashed by the #MeToo movement to draw cautionary conclusions about how pop-culture misogyny can have real-world consequences: “If the camera is predatory, the culture is predatory as well.” She also takes time to highlight some inconvenient truths about the US film industry, where gender parity employment figures remain “worse than coal mining.” Premiered to warm reviews in Sundance, Brainwashed is currently on an extended festival tour, screening to packed houses in Karlovy Vary this week.
Instead of high-minded theory, Menkes uses a very simple set of tools to hammer home her arguments about screen misogyny. Drawing from dozens of examples, she shows how the same recurring visual tropes – male subject watching female object, gendered use of slow motion and lighting, women characters reduced to body parts, and so on – are now deeply ingrained in the language of cinema. As a related side issue, she also highlights numerous examples of male directors abusing their power against female actors, sexualising young girls on screen, and shooting scenes in which women consent to sex with coercive men after initially saying no. Blade Runner (1982), Do The Right Thing (1989) and Buffalo 66 (1998) come out badly here, whereas Promising Young Woman (2020) attacks this trope head on.
Alongside Menkes herself, Brainwashed features an overwhelmingly female gallery of commentators including actors, directors, producers and academics. Feted film-makers such as Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust), Penelope Spheeris (Wayne’s World) and Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight) share their views, while screen star Rosanna Arquette recalls turning down Harvey Weinstein’s creepy sexual advances. The veteran feminist cultural theorist Laura Mulvey, credited with introducing the concept of the “male gaze” into film criticism with her seminal 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, also makes some lively contributions.
Menkes is not just tough on the usual suspects here. Old-school Hollywood alpha-males like Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, John Huston and Brian de Palma inevitably figure, but Brainwashed also takes a scalpel to critically lauded, prize-winning, art-house darlings including Jean-Luc Godard, Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders, David Lynch, Spike Lee, Darren Aronofsky and Denis Villeneuve. A forensic scene deconstruction from Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980) suggests clear double standards towards male and female protagonists, while the leering treatment of Arquette’s character in After Hours (1985) is plain bizarre: “the sexually passive object is so passive she’s actually dead,” Menkes quips.
Even female-directed films like Sofia Coppola’s Lost In Translation (2003), Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008) and Julia Ducorneau’s Titane (2021) do not get a free pass in Brainwashed. The codes of cinematic sexism are so pervasive that they are often invisible, Menkes argues, internalised both by women who make films and women who consume them. Meanwhile, more recent #MeToo era films that specifically set our to protest the sexual objectification of women, like Jay Roach’s Bombshell (2019), sometimes fall into their own trap. As Dash wryly remarks, quoting Audre Lorde, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
It is hard to disagree with Menkes, on her basic premise at least, given the torrent of examples she gives in Brainwashed. But it might have been useful to have at least one interviewee constructively challenge her fairly rigid interpretations, applying critical thinking to critical thinking. Persuading Scorsese, Lee or Coppola to defend their stylistic choices in person, for example, would have been a major coup. Menkes also glosses a little too vaguely over some pretty contentious claims, notably about proven links between sexist imagery, sexual assault and “rape culture”. These links may well be proven, but not here.
That said, Brainwashed was never designed to be a nuanced, even-handed history lesson. Entertaining? Yes. Educational? Certainly. Shocking? Sometimes. Seething with rage about toxic sexism, on screen and off? Absolutely. “The film is a polemic that is balancing 120 years of the male gaze on our backs,” Menkes said in a recent interview. “I’m not trying to be balanced.”
Venue: Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Out of the Past)
Cast: Nina Menkes, Laura Mulvey, Rhiannon Aarons, Rosanna Arquette, Raja Bhattar, Lara Dale, Julie Dash, May Hong HaDuong, Catherine Hardwicke, Eliza Hittman, Iyabo Kwayana, Jodi Lampert, Ita O’Brien, Freddy D. Ramsey Jr, Joey Soloway, Penelope Spheeris, Charlyne Yi
Director, screenwriter, producer: Nina Menkes
Executive producers: Tim Disney, Susan Disney Lord, Abigail Disney
Cinematography: Shana Hagan
Editing: Cecily Rhett
Music: Sharon Farber
Production company: Menkesfilm (US)
World sales: Cinephil, Tel Aviv
In English
107 minutes
