Nina Menkes’ bracing 1991 feature Queen of Diamonds is one of a group of notable films by female auteurs that have recently been restored and brought back into wider circulation. But rather than using the momentum as of yet to get another fictional film in production (her last to-date was Phantom Love, which premiered in 2007), Menkes has adapted a lecture presentation she began giving in 2018 entitled “Sex and Power: The Visual Language of Oppression” into Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power, the first solo-directed non-fiction work in her filmography.
Surveying how the male gaze, as theorized by Laura Mulvey in her pathbreaking essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” has influenced and hamstrung the medium across its history, Menkes has received some critical pushback for this film, including from those who were supportive of her more experimental fiction work, which is considered ahead-of-its-time and certainly would’ve received greater attention in today’s more egalitarian independent film climate. Yet the documentary still alights on an essential truth about how women are portrayed on screen, and its conclusions are hard to fault; providing counter-examples would dull the sharp, clear way the film conveys its argument. On the eve of its U.S. general release, after a global festival run that commenced at Sundance, I caught up with Menkes on Zoom across two time zones––with her in New York, and myself in London, UK.
The Film Stage: Considering the film has been out there—shown all around the world—since Sundance, what have you found most interesting and notable about the response to Brainwashed across this year, from audiences, critics, and colleagues?
Nina Menkes: Audiences have been incredible. Because of COVID, there were less in-person screenings than usual, although those we’ve had have been mind-boggling. Last night here in New York, there were women crying, as in weeping. And the same thing happened to us a couple of weeks ago in Finland. There seems to be an unbelievably powerful reaction from audiences. They’re really moved. I don’t want to sound like I’m self-complimenting, but a lot of people have said, “Oh my God, this thing that I’ve always felt inside that I couldn’t really articulate has been articulated.”
This one woman said it was kind of similar to when she went to AA or Al-Anon for the first time, and realized that her father’s alcoholism had this huge impact on her life. It was this wake-up, “Oh my God, this shit I’ve been consciously absorbing my whole life has really impacted my very most personal moments, the most private moments.” So that’s what we’ve heard from audiences pretty consistently. Critics, we’ve had a mix: on the one hand, we’ve had some rave reviews, and on the other hand we’ve been attacked. I guess I should expect that.
But the interesting thing about the attacks is that I notice that they seem to have two things in common, if I can be so bold. They’re both errors, if I may say so. The first thing is that a number of critics have made a comment that can be summarized as, “but she’s not taking any notice of the context of these films.” And to that I would say: I’m glad you noticed, because that’s the whole point. And I think that I’ve made that quite clear in the movie, that the whole central idea is to not look at context and to look at the meta-message that underlies a huge variety of films—regardless of context, regardless of decades, regardless of genre, regardless of whether it’s a male or female director, that there is a system that of gendered shot design where male actors and female actors are shot very differently.
And in a way that is, in my humble opinion, detrimental to the idea of women as full-on human subjects. And that meta-message that underlies, regardless of the context, is what I’m talking about. So when people say, “Well, you’re not looking at the context,” my answer is that is correct. So I did want to mention that. Another thing, a bit of a pet peeve that I’ve heard more than once is, “Nina only uses her own films to show what good filmmaking is.”
But you don’t, though.
Bullshit. I mean, excuse me, but we have about 25 examples of a lot of different filmmakers. From Agnès Varda to Gus Van Sant to Céline Sciamma, to Julie Dash, to Dorothy Arzner. So this is, frankly, it’s just bullshit. [Laughs.] So those two comments I’ve heard quite, quite often and I reject both of them. They’re there, they’re wrong, and they’re false.
Thank you. Wow. Those comments almost feel like they could’ve been in the film itself.
I know!
Let’s go back to the beginning. How did you come to make Brainwashed in the first place? And was there more urgency to put it together after the MeToo and Time’s Up revelations and activism?
Let me start with a short, short note on Time’s Up. Our team member, Maria Giese—who was the instigator of [addressing employment discrimination] starting in 2014, 2015—went to the ACLU with statistics. And then the ACLU went to the EEOC—as I’m sure you know, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission—with the statistics and then the federal government went into secret negotiations with the Hollywood studios over their blatantly illegal sex discrimination. And that really launched this whole thing of, like: whoa, what’s happening in the film industry? These statistics are out of control and we have seen change. Maria Giese explained to me that hashtag-Time’s Up was created by the agency CAA, in her opinion, as a way to sort of co-opt the movement. So the Brainwashed team are not using that hashtag. So the employment revolution happened thanks to Maria Giese and the ACLU, the EEOC, and—on top of that—the MeToo movement, which was launched in 2017 with the Harvey Weinstein article in the New York Times.
I never had the idea to make the film until quite a bit after the Weinstein article broke. This was a talk that I had given to my students over the years. A very abridged version of the talk had maybe 10-to-12 film clips and it just went chronological and gave some key examples. After the Weinstein story, I wrote an essay in Filmmaker Magazine, which was about the visual language of cinema, employment discrimination, and sexual assault. And this article went viral, much to our shock. It became the most popular article of the year at Filmmaker magazine. And then I was invited here and there to give my talk. And it really started in Sundance 2018. After my talk, I was bombarded by people going, “Oh my God, you have to make this into a feature film. The whole world has to see this?” It wasn’t my idea. It came from other people who said, yeah, we need this movie. And so I went to Tim Disney and he said “I think it’s important. Let’s do it.” So that’s what happened.
Do you feel other critics deploying the manner of analysis you’re using in the film have been limited by their lacking practical filmmaking experience? Because I feel professional critics or film academics wouldn’t perceive these issues in the manner of someone who has a full body of artistic work behind them.
I think I would break your question into two parts. The first is: has this been talked about before? Has the male gaze been talked about before by critics? Yes, of course it has. I mean, Laura Mulvey coined the phrase back in 1975. She is the one who came up with this concept of to-be-looked-at-ness. And then, over the years, many people have discussed it in the academic world—whether it’s talking about appropriating the male gaze, [how] you can use it as a queer gaze, [how] you can read across the lines and you can, using the context, spin it this way and that. Okay, that’s awesome. But there’s a limited amount of people who read high-level film criticism, right? So the idea in making Brainwashed was twofold. One is like you said: to talk to a much wider audience. And talk to not only filmmakers but film viewers, which is everybody.
And you have all those inserts of the crowd as well throughout the lecture in the film, which felt very pointed to me.
What you’re saying is do I have a particular perspective as a filmmaker as opposed to being a theorist? I am not a theorist. And I mean, you can say I am but what I was hopefully adding to the conversation here is connected to my career as a filmmaker and shooting my own films—not Brainwashed, but all my other films.
Oh, so you were the DP on everything?
The last two films of mine, Phantom Love and Dissolution, I worked with the DP who was handling the lights, but I did camera operating, and before that I was the entire DP. So when I come at it I’m coming at it from a super-practical point of view, and I very purposely have left out the all the castration theory—all that stuff—and just said: let’s look at these very concrete and, in a certain way, very simple points; let’s remove context, let’s remove all the fancy-schmancy stuff that’s layered on top and just look at this very hardcore, in a way simple, but powerfully meaningful system of shot design.
Has there been anything you’ve seen in the past 12 months or so, amongst newly released films, that you feel have used the grammar of cinema more responsibly, which perhaps consciously reject the way of seeing you outline in the film? Beyond Promising Young Woman and Nomadland, which are cited. And I felt conflicted at times watching it—acknowledging the depiction of women in Lynch’s Lost Highway for instance, despite it being a film I revere.
I have to disclaimer because I’ve been completely overwhelmed with finishing and the release of Brainwashed. I haven’t seen as many films in the last 12 months as I usually do, so I probably missed some really important examples. We tried to include some recent films that are obviously examples that don’t do that, whether it’s a Portrait of a Lady on Fire—Promising Young Woman and Nomadland being notable ones—and then going back in history and looking at Jeanne Dielman. Of course Varda. Gus Van Sant. And A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. I can’t remember the whole list of all the films that we include as examples of people who work against the grain.
Lost Highway for me is very problematic in terms of the fantasy sexualization of the woman. And again, it’s important for me to emphasize that I’m not, as I say in the film, the sex police. There’s nothing wrong with having a fantasy image of a woman here and there. Fantasy images are part of our life. The problem with it is the way it has dominated cinematic language for decades and the way that it has not only has been a hallmark of numerous, zillion so-called masterpieces of world cinema that are taught in film schools and are held up as the golden standard, but has infiltrated our consciousness so deeply.
It does impact our lives in a very serious way. Let’s look at Roe v. Wade. Roe v. Wade, in my opinion, is highly related to all this stuff. Are women full human subjects who can make decisions about their own lives and their own bodies? Or are they objects standing by, ready to have a baby, on command of the state? These issues are not just frivolous. It’s very serious.
Absolutely. You speak candidly in the film about yourself and this contrast between how you felt as an individual at film school and elsewhere in life. And it’s impactful.
I can tell you that I’ve been bombarded by women after screenings saying, “Thank you for delineating this issue.” So I always felt it inside and I think that heterosexual women feel it more. But it’s very hard to escape even if you’re aware of it.
I think it’s something I’d love my mom or my whole family—but especially my mom—to see. And in a different era this is the sort of accessible but still rigorous documentary that would play—I mean, I don’t know as much about American broadcasting—on BBC2 or Channel 4 at 9 p.m. Now, people like critics or journalists have to shout about it on social media. But it could also be the work of yours that’s seen the widest.
Right. I wouldn’t be surprised at all. The BFI is putting the film out in the UK. It will be released theatrically in the spring, along with the retrospective of my other work.
The Bloody Child is actually screening this week at the ICA in London, courtesy of The Machine That Kills Bad People, an excellent film collective that show experimental work in double bills; the feature is often paired with a short. It’s a beautiful venue, in case you know it.
I love The Bloody Child.
Oh, you do.
Which is very radical in form.
Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power is now in theaters and will expand. Learn more here.