Rent Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power (2022)

Thought Provoking Film Documentary - Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power review by GI

For serious film aficionados and students of film form and critical analysis this is an interesting and though provoking documentary from film director Nina Menkes looking at the institution of the 'male gaze' in cinema and she proposes its repercussions in social-political environments of the real world. Menkes carefully shows the construction of image around the female form and her clear and evidenced look is eye opening. When I did Film Studies many years ago the 'male gaze' was an openly discussed issue but never within the context of sexual assault and female disempowerment. Menkes takes a really hard look at this using a wide range of film clips to emphasise her various points. I support the theory that the presentation of the female form as an object of desire can have a knock on effect within the context of real world ideas about women's roles and opportunities and their position within sexual relationships. There are one or two flawed concepts within the film and the role of female directors exploiting the 'male gaze' phenomena are not always pushed to a satisfactory exposé. But this is a very interesting and eye opening documentary and any student of film should see this.

Many qualities but ultimately rather simplistic and lacking nuance - Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power review by PD

This one's an expansive documentary essay on the gendered nature of film language by Nina Menkes. Using over 175 snippets of footage from scores of films, as well as interviews with filmmakers such as Joey Soloway, Julie Dash, and Catherine Hardwicke, among others, it represents a slickly assembled collage that seeks to illustrate Menkes’ “understandings about shot design and the established cinematic canon,” to quote her directly. Clearly made with the best of intentions, unfortunately however the film is founded on a rather simplistic and weakly argued thesis that doesn't do justice to the many waves of feminist film theory in academic circles. In essence, Menkes proposes here a watered-down version of Laura Mulvey’s ideas about the “male gaze,” a term Mulvey coined in her foundational 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (although to her credit Menkes dispenses with much of the juicy psychoanalytic language about phallocentrism and scopophilia Mulvey retconned from Freud).

'Brainwashed' has many qualities, not least many interesting interviewees, but the presence of a solid theoretical framework is not one of its virtues. Menkes takes that central, so-basic-it’s-banal notion about who does the looking in film, and who is looked at, in order to mount a critique of the quintessentially patriarchal nature of film language. Which is fine as far as it goes, but the thesis here is ultimately so reductive and lacking in nuance that presents a number of problems, not least of which is that the model can’t cope with films made by female directors who don’t fit Menkes’ strictures. Cheryl Dunye’s extreme close-ups of two women making love in The Watermelon Woman gets a pass of course, but Sofia Coppola’s long held shot of Scarlett Johansson’s derriere in the opening minutes of Lost in Translation is for her too much like the male gaze, whilst Kathryn Bigelow earns recognition for being the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director for The Hurt Locker, but gets dinged for hiring all men to supervise the key craft contributions. The film is more persuasive when it engages with the realpolitik of the film industry, addressing the innate and persistent sexism in Hollywood specifically that’s challenged and humiliated filmmakers from Rosanna Arquette to Penelope Spheeris. Fellow director and activist Maria Giese talks informatively about efforts to use the 1964 Civil Rights Act to find a legal path to reducing discrimination against women in the industry, a topic that deserves a documentary all its own, and Ita Obrien also helps to move the discussion into the 21st century given how filmmakers now can make films that express a female or even non-binary gaze, the latter a particular concern of Soloway’s.

It’s frustrating therefore that these lines of inquiry aren’t pursued fully; instead, the bulk of the film consists of offering up yet more clips from canonical male voyeuristic fare. There are undoubtedly many to choose from, but equally a fair few scenes selected here are analysed in isolation from the rest of the films in which they are from. For example, she demonstrates the 'man as subject, woman as object' shot through a scene from “Phantom Thread,” insisting that it implies that Daniel Day-Lewis’ Reynolds Woodcock has power over Vicky Krieps' Alma, but had she bothered to study this in relation to the context of the entire film, we would see how director Paul Thomas Anderson then flips this visual language, along with the power structure of Woodcock and Alma’s relationship, by the end of the film (I'm sure Menkes knows this, so I'm afraid she's guilty of simply choosing to ignore something that doesn't fit the thesis, which is unworthy of her). Needless to say, the film also has no time to explore the complexity of desire the way, for instance, Mulvey herself did in one of her other seminal essays which explored female spectatorship. All in all, a bit of a disappointment.