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At one point in her new documentary Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power, director Nina Menkes takes a closer look at a pivotal scene in the 2019 docudrama Bombshell, a film sometimes credited as being the first major Hollywood title to reckon with the #MeToo movement. In one sequence in the film, centered on the women at Fox News who accused former CEO Roger Ailes of sexual harassment, Ailes (played by John Lithgow) calls employee Kayla (Margot Robbie) to his office and asks her to pull her skirt up for him. Over the course of the excerpt shown in the documentary, several shots are shown from Ailes\u2019 perspective, with some traveling up or down the character\u2019s body. \u201cNeedless to say, this shot is not from Kayla\u2019s point of view,\u201d Menkes comments in the film, as she pauses on a shot that shows the character\u2019s crotch. \u201cHow would you shoot that scene where you really felt like we\u2019re feeling what Margot\u2019s feeling but not being exploitative about it or objectifying her?\u201d asks director Catherine Hardwicke (Miss Bala).<\/p>\n
Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power, which will premiere at Sundance on Saturday, argues that such filmmaking techniques are ubiquitous \u2014 even in films with feminist messaging and female directors \u2014 thanks to a long, entrenched history of visual objectification of women in the medium. Bombshell is just one of many high-profile, acclaimed titles whose scenes Menkes dissects over the course of the film to uncover the sometimes conspicuous, sometimes subtle ways that shot design can be gendered. Co-produced by director Maria Giese, who instigated the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission investigation of discrimination against female directors, and co-executive produced by Abigail Disney, among others, Brainwashed also features interviews with directors Joey Soloway, Julie Dash and Amy Ziering, film theorist Laura Mulvey (who introduced the term \u201cthe male gaze\u201d in a 1975 essay) and actors Rosanna Arquette and Charlyne Yi. Arguing that this \u201cvisual language\u201d can have real-world consequences, especially in the entertainment industry, the film is poised to reinvigorate conversations about the way women are treated in Hollywood through the lens of filmmaking technique.<\/p>\n
At least, that\u2019s the goal. \u201cI feel like the fact of the history of cinema being, you could say, built on the sexualized image of women has not been really brought to consciousness in the way that I feel this film does,\u201d Menkes says.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s fitting Brainwashed will premiere at this year\u2019s virtual edition of the Sundance Film Festival, as Menkes says her experience at the festival four years earlier helped push her to make it. The boundary-pushing feminist independent filmmaker behind 1991\u2019s Queen of Diamonds and 1996\u2019s The Bloody Child (she was one of the first women to ever present a feature at the Park City festival) and CalArts instructor had, for years, delivered a talk about the visual objectification of women in film to her students. She had begun touring with it more widely a year earlier when, in early 2018, Menkes brought the talk to Park City. The lecture had previously \u201cstruck a nerve\u201d with general audiences, she says, but at that Sundance in the wake of the start of the #MeToo movement, she was \u201cmobbed by people afterwards,\u201d several telling her she should turn the lecture into a feature film. Though Menkes had never made a documentary before, and though usually she develops film ideas via a more intuitive, internal process, she paid attention.<\/p>\n
Initial conversations with potential collaborators didn\u2019t go anywhere, but early in 2019 Menkes decided to pitch filmmaker (and grandson of Disney co-founder Roy O. Disney) Tim Disney \u2014 they had met previously at a film festival \u2014 on the project. Disney joined as an executive producer alongside his sisters, Abigail Disney and Susan Disney Lord. The majority of the film\u2019s funding came from the Disneys and was offered as a tax-deductible donation to the International Documentary Association via the organization\u2019s fiscal sponsorship program. The IDA then contributed the funding back to Menkes to make the film. (The filmmakers plan on donating a significant amount of eventual net profit to a charity, which has not yet been identified.)<\/p>\n
Menkes shot her lecture for Brainwashed, clips of which are threaded throughout the film, pre-pandemic. However, COVID-19 interrupted the bulk of its production, throwing extra challenges her way. Once the virus began to spread stateside, the core Brainwashed team communicated primarily over Zoom and phone calls. Early on in the pandemic, many potential interviewees for the film were reticent to participate, fearful of leaving their homes or taking off masks. When vaccines became available, more people were open to the idea (\u201cCatherine Hardwicke was like \u2018I\u2019ll be vaccinated by March,’\u201d Menkes recalls).<\/p>\n
Giese, who boarded the project as a co-producer in 2019, marveled at how more women were open to talking about women\u2019s issues in Hollywood at this time compared to her experience in the pre-#MeToo, early days of production on the 2018 documentary This Changes Everything, which examined gender disparity in Hollywood. \u201cAt the time Nina was shooting this, women wanted to be in the conversation. It became popular,\u201d she says. A number of the film\u2019s interviews were conducted by Menkes over Zoom, with a small, local, vaccinated crew shooting the footage.<\/p>\n
How to turn a lecture into a film that \u201cmight be hard-hitting, but it\u2019s basically fun to watch,\u201d Menkes says, initially stumped her. Early on in the postproduction process, the lecture provided the film\u2019s structure, but when editor and creative producer Cecily Rhett (NOS4A2, Bates Motel) joined the documentary in the fall of 2020, she suggested arranging the film thematically and helped brainstorm additional individuals to ask for interviews, including director of photography Nancy Schreiber (P-Valley, Station 19), to help bolster the film\u2019s points.<\/p>\n
They wanted to bring some \u201clight\u201d into the film, Rhett says, given the heavy nature of the film\u2019s topics: The filmmakers decided at one point, \u201cLet\u2019s talk about how women were prevalent in the silent film industry,\u201d Rhett recalls. One challenge was determining which film clips they wanted and also could use \u2014 Menkes\u2019 lecture originally employed 10 to 15 clips, while the finished film utilized 175. Menkes worked closely with the independent film-focused law firm Donaldson Callif Perez on ensuring their clips were fair-use. \u201cI spent every weekend basically scrounging the Internet looking for clips that would work for the movie,\u201d Menkes says, noting that she had to \u201caudition\u201d clips in the film to see if they worked.<\/p>\n
The picture was locked just a few weeks after the filmmakers sent the project for consideration to Sundance in late July 2021. After it was accepted, Menkes says she heard from festival programmer Sudeep Sharma that Sundance team members had seen the film early in the festival\u2019s selection process, and it had influenced the way they viewed other films that were submitted.<\/p>\n
Brainwashed, which will be seeking distribution at Sundance with UTA handling sales, isn\u2019t shy about calling out how contemporary, highly esteemed directors \u2014 female helmers included \u2014 continue to use filmmaking techniques that Menkes argues are gendered. Shot design that has traditionally objectified women, she argues, includes framing that fragments women\u2019s body parts; using soft instead of 3-D lighting; particular camera movements, like panning over women\u2019s bodies; and point-of-view that regularly renders women the object, rather than the subject, of a scene. In addition to classic examples (in titles including Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s Notorious, Vincente Minnelli and Busby Berkeley\u2019s Cabin in the Sky and Orson Welles\u2019 The Lady From Shanghai), Brainwashed also points to more recent instances in films from Quentin Tarantino (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood), Paul Thomas Anderson (Phantom Thread), Denis Villeneuve (Blade Runner 2049), Nicolas Winding Refn (Neon Demon) and Alex Garland (Ex Machina). Projects from directors including Lorene Scafaria (Hustlers), Patty Jenkins (Wonder Woman), Julia Ducournau (Titane) and Ma\u00efmouna Doucour\u00e9 (Cuties) don\u2019t escape criticism for utilizing some of these time-worn approaches. <\/p>\n
One example of gendered framing that Brainwashed points to is the scene in The Breakfast Club where Judd Nelson\u2019s character hides under the desk of Molly Ringwald\u2019s character and the camera shows his point of view as he looks up her skirt. (The Handmaiden, Superbad, Straight Time and Oldboy are also excerpted for the framing of particular scenes.) Slow motion is often utilized to highlight women\u2019s bodies, Menkes says, such as in the scene of Halle Berry emerging from the ocean in Die Another Day, while for men it\u2019s often employed for action scenes, such as in Sherlock Holmes or 300. The different ways that men and women can to be lighted in films is demonstrated by the introduction of Scarlett Johansson\u2019s character in Lost in Translation: Her first appearance is via a fragmented shot of her rear in sheer underwear, with soft lighting; by contrast, Bill Murray\u2019s character shows up with the camera focused on his face as he\u2019s lit in a way that shows depth and shadows.<\/p>\n
Menkes says her team reached out to living filmmakers\u2019 representatives for comment when a substantial clip from one of their films was used, but most turned down an interview and those that did respond provided off-the-record comments. \u201cWe wanted to be disruptive, we wanted to be provocative and we didn\u2019t care if somebody was upset about it,\u201d adds Giese. \u201cWe all have to look at what we\u2019re doing and think about it a lot more.\u201d<\/p>\n
Menkes, paraphrasing one of her lines in the film, clarifies, \u201cI\u2019m not the sex police and I\u2019m not trying to tell people how to make movies.\u201d She adds, \u201cI want to raise consciousness.\u201d Some recent projects have shot women differently than the norm and creatively, Menkes notes in Brainwashed \u2014 titles like A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Nomadland and Portrait of a Lady on Fire. When asked about 2021 titles, Menkes says she\u2019s been impressed by The Lost Daughter and Passing.<\/p>\n
Giese believes Brainwashed is the \u201cnatural next iteration\u201d in the most recent push to change conditions for women in entertainment that began with the EEOC investigation, announced by the American Civil Liberties Union in 2016. \u201cOnce that groundwork was laid, then we could begin to explain \u2018Okay, how has this whole thing been working in terms of visual style?’\u201d she says. \u201cMy hope is that there\u2019s no going back after Brainwashed.\u201d<\/p>\n
View this article at The Hollywood Reporter<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sundance: \u2018Brainwashed\u2019 Doc Examines the Subtle (and Not-So-Subtle) Ways Women Are Objectified Onscreen: Featuring interviews with filmmakers like Joey Soloway, Julie Dash, Catherine Hardwicke and others, director Nina Menkes argues that the \u201cvisual language\u201d of filmmaking \u2014 even from women helmers \u2014 can have real-world consequences, especially in the entertainment industry: \u201cWe all have to
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