Review: “Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power”
This 2022 Sundance documentary from director Nina Menkes analyzes sexism in shot design and its fallout
The documentary Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power is sad, infuriating, and revelatory. Objectifying women in film and media is nothing new; yet in analyzing how filmmakers shoot men and women differently, director Nina Menkes shows just how entrenched — and insidious — this way of seeing is.
Brainwashed, which debuted at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, takes its framework from Menkes’s presentation, “Sex and Power: The Visual Language of Cinema,” as a faculty member at the California Institute of the Arts. She has lectured on this topic elsewhere, including in London in 2019 and at Sundance in 2018.
Audiences and filmmakers are more aware of bias in scripts and plot mechanics, but shot design is sneakier, Menkes says. Brainwashed intersperses clips from classic, popular, and indie films with Menkes’s observations and insights from academics and a diverse group of industry professionals. These include film theorist Laura Mulvey (Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema), producer Amy Ziering (Allen v. Farrow, The Hunting Ground), director Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust, Queen Sugar), director Eliza Hittman (Never Rarely Sometimes Always), and director Maria…
