Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power from filmmaker Nina Menkes uses clips from more than 175 films, many Hollywood hits or cult classics, in this film based on her talk Sex and Power: The Visual Language of Cinema. The film combines the movie clips with those of her talk, as well as interviews with scholars, filmmakers, and students of cinema to paint a picture of how repeated imagery on the screen has repercussions in the film industry and world at large.
I went to film school, so I was familiar with the concept of the male gaze and its originator Laura Mulvey before this film. However, it’s very different reading an essay and understanding the concept and seeing how that male gaze, that POV, is utilized in shot after shot, by a myriad of filmmakers and how it shapes perceptions and power dynamics.
One aspect of shot design highlighted that stood out to me because I’d never heard it so articulated, was the use of slow motion. For men, slow motion is used for action, in fight sequences, it shows them as powerful. For women, it’s used for sexualization, to emphasize the body pan, another way of making them an object.
Now the repercussions are of course that if women are treated as objects on-screen, they are viewed similarly off-screen. 94% of women in Hollywood experience sexual harassment or assault. The countless number of films that often through a music cue signal reversal from a woman who has given a man a hard no on a sexual advance to accepting it with great enthusiasm. They glamourize men ignoring denials of consent. A real-world example Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power gives that illustrates this power dynamic at play is of director Abdellatif Kechiche. Abdellatif Kechiche is best known for directing Blue Is the Warmest Colour. Despite the experiences his leads had making the film, he won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for it. On his next film series, he plied his actors with alcohol, intentionally impairing them so they’d engage in un-simulated sex. He was awarded for one film which displayed women graphicly as objects, so he was emboldened to go further.
Hustlers was an interesting choice of film to include, and I wish they talked about it instead of just showing clips. Image-wise the clips utilized fit with the themes they are highlighting at those given times. However, after having watched Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power, I couldn’t help but think of how interesting Hustlers is as a case study. Hustlers was billed as empowering, and I do think there is something empowering in the story of women who fleece men who view them as objects for large sums of money. However, it still utilized many shots that make the Hustlers the objects instead of the subjects. Much in the same way the clip they highlighted from Bombshell failed its narrative by using a POV of Roger Ailes (played by John Lithgow) instead of staying with the POV of Kayla (played by Margot Robbie). It made me interested in what kind of film we could see if we had these concepts at play, without the shot design that has been utilized to keep the cis-gendered heterosexual male maintain his power.
I think this film represents a powerful educational tool because some filmmakers probably have even propagated some of these shots have done so unintentionally. Catherine Hardwicke, who was interviewed, spoke about how she lights women differently than men because the Hollywood system is so ingrained that women must be lit so as not to show lines, to appear soft. In this small way, she played into making her female characters “the object” to the viewer.
While this film’s focus was on the male gaze and breaking from it, sometimes the best examples can be from the exception to prove the rule. This was done with a clip from Mandingo, introduced as “racist trash,” in which a white woman rapes a black man. In the scene, the black actor is shot in the way female actors usually are, by having his body segmented. This clip was utilized to show how insidious this shot design is, one seen in basically every movie that involves a sex scene with a female actor, and how insidious this shot design is as a method to perpetuate power dynamics and the commodification of bodies.
Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.