“Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power” director Nina Menkes connects the dots between film language and real-world sexism, Ann Hornaday writes.
Informed by the groundbreaking work of such theorists as Judith Butler, bell hooks and Laura Mulvey — who in the 1970s originated the concept of a “male gaze” in cinema — Menkes kept refining her talk, loading it with clips from films considered masterpieces and urging her students to look deeper than narrative structure and subject matter to how films are staged, photographed and put together.
In 2017, Menkes wrote an essay for the cinema journal Filmmaker connecting the aesthetic language of film — the voyeuristic habit of cameras panning up and down female bodies; the predatory metaphor of fragmenting those bodies into close-ups of breasts, behinds or other body parts; the flattening of women’s facial images into airbrushed, lifeless masks — to the behavior of former film producer Harvey Weinstein and his fellow executives in real life.
In early October, Menkes discussed “Brainwashed” during a two-hour Zoom session. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.Nina, in your introduction before the Sundance screening of “Brainwashed” in January, you said that making this film was an “act of liberation,” adding that “I didn’t even know I was in prison.” You’ve been working with this material for over 20 years, and yet this was a process of discovery for you.
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