Sitting in the QFT’s Screen One watching Brainwashed I recalled the opening night of General Assembly, an annual ceremony that sees the outgoing Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland finish his year (and yes, it’s always been a man) and hand over the mantle of the office to the incoming Moderator. What she’s talking about isn’t constrained to the world of film. It’s all about choice, and changing the choices that are routinely made. In later parts of her discourse, Menkes demonstrates some alternatives and it’s plainly obvious that a variety of approaches and a more fulsome visual dictionary would be welcome. It’s just they’re used somewhat consistently and monotonously at the expense of women. The techniques she highlights are perfectly valid and effective cinematic tools of the trade. Menkes doesn’t set out to become the sex police. And even when a film is ostensibly feminist, about women, or directed by a woman, that’s no guarantee that the popular tropes won’t still permeate the final product. Menkes and her contributors point out that it’s a double whammy of who and how films tend to be made. This male gaze is very recognisable yet mostly ignored by audiences and not worthy of note by reviewers. What makes her pitch devastating is how when she strings the different elements together it becomes clear that a vastly male cohort of directors, working with mostly male heads of departments (who hire mostly male staff) on a film, in the hands of mostly male distributors, have created an ABC of filmmaking and patriarchy that is designed to deliver for male audiences by disempowering women on and off screen. Much of what Menkes shares is obvious, and you’ll already be aware of some of it. You’ll soon be cognisant that the more glamourous a scene is, the more powerless the ‘object’ of that scene. Yet the level of control in Brainwashed is such that neither tittering nor nudge nudge wink wink moments can be remotely entertained. In their original context, using the techniques that Menkes is deconstructing, the scenes will have dialled up the eroticism of these big-name movies. More than this reviewer has ever stumbled across at a 10 o’clock in the morning preview screening before. But rest assured, Menkes knows what she’s talking about, and after 20 minutes you’ll be sizing up the on-screen clips ahead of her commentary to detect whether the woman in the shot is the subject or (more likely) the object recognising closeups of fragmented female body parts spotting the slomo action noticing that men are sexy when they’re moving but women are depicted still tell-tale panning shots that scan across a woman’s body, undressing her with the camera gendered lighting hearing the orchestra crank into action to soften scenes of men once again ignoring their total lack of consent.Īnd when I say the lecture is ‘illustrated’, let’s be clear that there are a lot of bums, many boobs and even a few balls projected onto the silver screen. The word ‘lecture’ may not immediately appeal to your lust for nipping out to the cinema. Director Nina Menkes delivers an illustrated lecture on sex and power, the visual language of cinema, in the documentary Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power.
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