Have you ever wondered why in the last scene of Alien (1979) by Ridley Scott, totally out of the blue, the powerful Warrant Officer Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), after surviving some of the scariest creatures in the whole universe, gets undressed in real-time? The documentary Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power by director Nina Menkes might provide some of the answers you were looking for.
Based on her lecture “Sex and Power: The Visual Language of Oppression” held at Sundance Festival in 2018 and following the Filmmaker’s viral article “The Visual Language of Oppression; Harvey Wasn’t Working in a Vacuum”, Brainwashed debuted at Berlinale 2022. This documentary is not only a great compendium of feminist knowledge. But also, a manual for every future director who doesn’t want to contribute to the rape culture that is visible all over Hollywood, as well as our society.
During her teaching experience at the University of South California and at the California Institute of the Arts, Menkes has observed how her students and future directors re-enact and adopt, without even noticing, those techniques that are feeding into what she argues to be a vicious triangle. The three tips of this triangle are: the visual language of cinema, sexual abuse & assault, and employment statistics. According to Menkes, these are deeply intertwined.
Menkes enlightens how cinematic praxis of the mainstream (and not just mainstream) contributes to gender discrimination in the film industry and beyond. To do so, she builds upon Laura Mulvey’s theory of the ‘Male Gaze’ and ‘To-Be-Looked-at-ness’ coined in the ‘70s. Namely that women in the media are viewed from the eyes of a heterosexual man, and that these women are represented as passive objects of male desire.
By analyzing film clips by A-list directors from the 1940s until today, Menkes provides the viewer with five very clear categories useful to detect the patriarchal structures embedded in most movies. She enlightens how shot design is gendered – male and female actors are usually shot completely differently. These are the narrative devices listed in what is now known as the Menkes Lists:
- POINT OF VIEW (POV): Male Subject/Female Object
- FRAMING: Fragmented Body Parts
- CAMERA MOVEMENT: Body Pans, tilts; often in slow motion
- LIGHTING: 3D (male) versus 2D or another fantasy lighting (female)
- NARRATIVE POSITION: The sexualized female body exists outside the narrative flow
The message delivered by this very pragmatic schematization can reach any viewer, from people in the movie industry to school pupils. And this, exactly, is the power of Brainwashed. Despite feeling a bit repetitive for activists and the well-read public, as the number of sexual harassment and violence on sets, as well as the gender gap pay, do not seem to decrease, a little redundancy cannot harm. In fact, the generosity with which Menkes is sharing her knowledge and the outcome of years of research is admirable.
What is particularly interesting is how Menkes, towards the ends of Brainwashed, also analyses scenes from her acclaimed movies like Magdalena Viraga (1986) or Queen of Diamonds (1991) to provide a positive counterexample to all the previous ones. This might seem a bit self-celebratory at first but is much appreciated if we see Brainwashedas a critical piece of art that is not only sharp on theory, but also deeply in praxis. Along these lines, the official website of the documentary has a whole section dedicated to tools (like “The Bechdel-Wallace Test” or “Intimacy on Screen”) to support directors in the production of more equitable movies.
Consider yourself warned; after watching Brainwashed, you might start having a different opinion about some of your favorite movies and directors.
Caption picture: Nina Menkes, Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power by Nina Menkes, USA 2022, Panorama © Menkesfilm