Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power, dir. Nina Menkes ★★★★★
People are easily absorbed and anaesthetised by moving images, especially if they’ve been crafted, over decades, by men with a patriarchal sense of film grammar. With its vivid deconstruction of the male gaze in cinema, Nina Menkes’ latest film Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power shakes you into consciousness. Despite the theories existing since the 70s with the feminist film scholar Laura Mulvey, who’s one of many women academics and directors interviewed for the film, Menkes provides them with a new cinematic urgency.
Delivered like a film studies lecture, Brainwashed takes a largely formalist approach. Menkes scrutinises shots from lauded films: analysing subject vs. object, framing, movement, lighting and narrative position. Fearlessly, she goes after the films of well-respected male directors like Paul Thomas Anderson, Jean-Luc Godard, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Spike Lee, David Lynch, Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, as well as female filmmakers like Sofia Coppola. No one is safe.
The resulting film is thrilling, argumentative and confrontational – changing the way you watch screen stories. Menkes occasionally takes the formalist approach too far, often avoiding the narrative context in which these shots are composed. For instance, she uses an exotic dance scene from Julia Ducournau’s Titane to demonstrate the eroticism of women’s bodies as viewed by men – without acknowledging the character’s gender transition later in the story, which challenges that gaze.
However, the common cinematic structures that transform women into inferior objects – often fragmented into body parts – are thoroughly examined. Brainwashed dismantles the magic of male-geared moviemaking and reveals how these gendered compositions extend misogynistic attitudes.
Photo: BFI
WHEN
From Friday 12 May
WHERE
In cinemas