Review by
Ren Zelen
Directed by: Nina Menkes
Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power is a documentary based upon a
lecture tour by academic and film-maker Nina Menkes, where she
dissects and examines the technical aspects of the male gaze in cinema.
But the film goes much further than that – Menkes begins to outline how
the consistent use of these techniques and images has affected society and
influenced how women see themselves and more worryingly, how men have been
inured into seeing women.
Cinema is shown to not simply be an art form seeking to entertain, amuse
or intrigue – its influence on how we "see" the world cannot be
underestimated, and according to Menkes, its subconscious conditioning has
been neither neutral nor harmless.
After over two decades of research Menkes has amassed a wealth of film
clips and testimonies to support her case. The aim of her film is to make
audiences aware of how their vision and perceptions have been conditioned
since Hollywood came into existence and Wall Street money men became
involved in its business.
Ironically, the early silent movies were a province where female
filmmakers were able to exercise their creativity and show their view of
the world. Sadly, that opportunity was soon taken from them as the doors
of male-run studios closed to their work.
Menkes makes the case that shot design is gendered and has been for
decades, so much so that it has become the "normal" way of shooting
scenes. As her eloquent interviewee Amy Zierling notes: "It’s
invisible, and you don’t notice the air."
Watching Menkes' interesting analyses will hopefully cause the
cinema-going audience to be more aware of how they have become accustomed
to seeing the world in a particular and simplified way - a binary way.
They will never look at perspective, slow-mo, fragmented bodies or female
faces presented in 2D without being more aware of how the visual image is
presenting a skewed point of view.
Menkes proceeds to move beyond the predatory camera and the subject-object
set-up. With her commentators - who include
Eliza Hittman, Julie Dash, Laura Mulvey, the intimacy co-ordinator
Ita O'Brien and Joey Soloway, among others, she talks about
the implied power conflict hidden in familiar tropes - the female butt
shot, the slow-pan down the body, the idea of the helpless unconscious
woman (as so interestingly outlined in the sex games of the husband/wife
characters in
Killing of a Sacred Deer
and more recently in the tragic revenge tale
Promising Young Woman). Actress Rosanna Arquette recalls that in Scorsese's
After Hours, her dead character's body was examined by the camera in an oddly sexual
way.
From dead/unconscious women to silent women - as with
Cathy Moriarty's character in Raging Bull, who was gazed at but literally couldn't be heard, even though the male
conversations taking place around her were given our attention. The female
character is there to be looked at, to be lusted over, but not to be
heard. It is not necessary to know her as a human being with thoughts and
feelings and opinions. The common way the camera portrays women turns them
into objects, examined as to their use, whose humanity (and therefore
their consent) is immaterial.
The "No" means "Yes" trope is also glamorised, such as when a woman
indicates she does not want to have sex but is "persuaded" or forced to
agree. There are telling scenes from Spike Lee films plus the well-known
scene in Bladerunner where Harrison Ford throws a resisting
Sean Young against a wall and insists that she say that she wants him.
Likewise, the stair scene in Gone with the Wind or when
Jessica Lange initially fights off Jack Nicholson in
The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981).
These images seep into the collective consciousness through the global
power of Hollywood, but in essence they are disempowering and negating
female autonomy and, in Menkes' words, they help to form "the bedrock of
the language of rape culture."
She admits that female directors aren't exempt from viewing the world
through the man-made lens that has become so familiar, even when they are
supposedly being "ironic." It's therefore probably no surprise that
Kathryn Bigelow has become the most known and successful female director
in Hollywood, as she makes male-oriented films about male stories.
This culture permeates into the real life of Hollywood. The documentary
then has actresses come forward to testify how their careers were damaged
because they refused to "play the game." The "game" often being an abusive
and exploitative one. They can be fired for no reason (or in the case of
female directors, not hired at all), asked to work unusual or excessive
hours, told to take their clothes off for scenes not in the script or
bullied into doing upsetting sex scenes which invade their bodies and
privacy.
Menkes' film is predominantly Hollywood-English-language-centric and shows
clips from her own films to illustrate how shots can be handled
differently, but unsurprisingly some European and Asian film directors
also get a damning analysis. The cinematic community has always been
deferential to the typically male-dominated film "Canon," conscious of the
fact that it's a male-dominated business.
Menkes pulls no punches in her well-researched and detailed examination in
Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power, revealing how society has indeed been "brainwashed" consciously or
unconsciously by filmmakers through virtually the entire history of
cinema.
Her documentary is a breath of fresh air in a stale environment and should
be compulsory viewing in every film-school (but probably won't be, as it's
too real). Hollywood deals in the cosmetic only, actual change is harder
to instigate, as we have seen from the sidelining of the "Me too"
movement. It would be a pity if, as we have too often seen before, plus ca
change, plus c'est la meme chose.
Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power is in UK/ROI cinemas from May 12th.