Brain­washed: Sex-Camera-Power

At the 2018 Cannes Film Fes­ti­val, in the wake of the #MeToo move­ment, film­mak­er Nina Menkes gave a pre­sen­ta­tion enti­tled, ​‘Sex and Pow­er, The Visu­al Lan­guage of Oppres­sion’. It’s a bold and dra­mat­ic title, as is that of the doc­u­men­tary she’s made based on that talk, Brain­washed: Sex-Cam­era-Pow­er. These words, along with the intense dread of Sharon Farber’s score, give the air of an indus­try-wide con­spir­a­cy about to be uncovered.

No such pomp and cir­cum­stance was giv­en to Lau­ra Mul­vey when she pub­lished her 1975 essay ​‘Visu­al Plea­sure and Nar­ra­tive Cin­e­ma’, which is the under­ly­ing text of Menkes’ own the­sis. Mul­vey appears in Brain­washed, intro­duced as ​“the orig­i­nal gang­ster film the­o­rist,” an epi­thet she seems unlike­ly to ascribe to her­self. The essay was a water­shed moment in film crit­i­cism, inves­ti­gat­ing the nuances of scopophil­ia and voyeurism com­mon­ly referred to as ​“the male gaze”.

Nuance isn’t Menkes’ strong suit. When show­ing clips, she sel­dom sets them up with any basic con­text. Instead she looks at cin­e­mat­ic images in iso­la­tion; an irony giv­en her cri­tique focus­es on the frag­ment­ed fram­ing of women’s bod­ies in cin­e­ma. Menkes nev­er con­sid­ers how the gaze is sub­vert­ed by cer­tain films with­in their nar­ra­tives, align­ing Apoc­a­lypse Now with Hus­tlers, for exam­ple, with­out dis­cussing the dif­fer­ence between Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s intent with that of Lorene Scafaria.

With­out these dis­tinc­tions, Brain­washed argues that all shots of women’s bod­ies are bad. Even Sofia Cop­po­la and Julia Ducour­nau are guilty in their fram­ing of women in 2003’s Lost in Trans­la­tion and 2021’s Titane because they have been ​‘brain­washed’ into cre­at­ing ​“pro­pa­gan­da for patri­archy”. Menkes espous­es a qua­si-rad­i­cal fem­i­nism where­in the sex­u­al­i­ty and self-sex­u­al­i­sa­tion of women only exists for the plea­sure of men, posi­tioned from her own cis het­ero­nor­ma­tive perspective.

The #MeToo aspect of Brain­washed, where­in Menkes goes sev­er­al steps fur­ther than Mul­vey, is to draw a direct line from ​“the male gaze” to employ­ment dis­crim­i­na­tion of women and sex­u­al assault. There is like­ly some truth to this claim, but the argu­ment that women as actors and direc­tors are com­plic­it in this agen­da is tan­ta­mount to accus­ing women of ​‘ask­ing for it’. Menkes ignores Mulvey’s work as a film­mak­er and the­o­rist expand­ing on and chang­ing the ideas of her 1975 essay, and much of the work done by the­o­rists includ­ing bell hooks and Tere­sa de Lau­retis whom view­ers would be bet­ter off reading.

At the end, Menkes ges­tures towards forms of sub­ver­sion and dif­fer­ence, par­tic­u­lar­ly with­in queer cin­e­ma. She acknowl­edges the dif­fer­ence between Abdel­latif Kechiche’s fram­ing of les­bian sex in Blue Is the Warmest Colour, Cheryl Dunye’s in The Water­mel­on Woman and Céline Sciamma’s Por­trait of a Lady on Fire, although she isn’t quite able to artic­u­late why. Menkes is in such a rush to get through the his­to­ry of cin­e­ma to point a fin­ger of blame at every­one except her­self, end­ing with her own films as exam­ples of a nega­tion of the gaze. Nobody’s perfect.

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