Nina Menkes in Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power (Hugo Wong/Sundance Institute)

The most emblematic work at this year’s Sundance Film Festival was Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power by veteran independent filmmaker Nina Menkes. In a departure for her, she has made a documentary, based on “Sex and Power: The Visual Language of Cinema,” a talk she gave at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival and other international festivals. Though she’s front and center, Menkes is joined by female filmmakers, actors, producers, academics, and historians to scrutinize Hollywood history. Menkes and company will confirm many of your suspicions/impressions and alter your way of viewing movies. At its best, the film magnifies the nuts and bolts of filmmaking and how it perpetuates “positions of power,” as it’s described here.

Menkes breaks down how directors have filmed men and women differently through shot design: the choice of who is the subject and object and who is acted upon, the shot composite, the camera movement, the lighting, and the narrative role the characters play. In doing so, she takes on some of the most sacred titles in the canon. Instead of focusing on the easiest targets, like the B movies of the 1970s and ’80s, she challenges viewers’ perceptions on Oscar winners and festival favorites: Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Color, among others. There are also the usual suspects: almost any film by Alfred Hitchcock, as well as Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill and Body Double, which were protested at the time of their release for their depiction of violence against women. 

Many in the interwoven sit-downs with the director point to how the male gaze has become normalized and pervasive, even in works made by women: Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers; Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, in which there is comparison between how Bill Murray is introduced and his costar, Scarlett Johansson; and Patty Jenkins’s 2017 blockbuster, where an empowered and heroic Wonder Woman looks like she’s strutting down a fashion runway. Occasionally, the discussion sounds like a university symposium (“This is propaganda for patriarchy,” says director Joey Soloway), and it could be argued that the camera work in the Palme d’Or–winning Titane, by Julia Ducournau, is intentionally sinister or “predatory.”

For the most part though, the commentary is blunt and conversational. Menkes’s intent is not to tear down these aforementioned filmmakers and their films. May Hong HaDuong of the UCLA Film and Television Archive acknowledges viewers can still respect, admire, and love a film while recognizing its flaws and all. The documentary’s objective, rather, is to name the problem, the film industry’s treatment of women. Menkes quotes James Baldwin: “Not everything can be changed until it is faced.”  

In recounting film history, the work is at its most convincing and compelling for film buffs. When Menkes attempts to associate film language to real-life sexual violence, she refers to studies that highlight a connection, yet they need much more vetting and likely their own films to come across as more than generalizations. They are perhaps the most debatable points raised here.  

As a result of watching Brainwashed, I was certainly conscious of how women and sex were depicted in the Sundance lineup. For example, Menkes points to how the bodies of women are often filmed closeup in fragments, where as men, even when objectified, take up the screen while engaging in an activity (Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike). In Babysitter, French Canadian director Monia Chokri deliberately films women’s fragmented bodies, namely closeups of (clothed) breasts, from the point of view of a misogynistic oaf who becomes the object of a social media pile on. (That is just one of the satire’s subjects; it has a lot on its plate.)  

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande’s Nancy Stokes (Emma Thompson) and the sex worker she hires, Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack), are filmed together or in separate full shots in their sex scenes. The camera never lingers. However, only Thompson appears completely nude and in a wide shot, but director Sophie Hyde’s intention is not sensational. Instead, it becomes about acceptance or celebration of a 50-something woman appreciating her body and sex appeal. In this private moment, Hyde takes on ageism.  

In the numerous sex scenes of Lena Dunham’s first directorial feature film in 11 years, Sharp Stick, both the man and the woman enjoy sexual pleasure equally, or at least that’s the mission: 26-year-old Sarah Jo (Kristine Froseth) intends to lose her virginity and become as sexually knowledgeable as quickly as possible. For a film drenched with sex talk, there’s virtually no nudity.  

In Brainwashed, one of its co-producers, activist Maria Giese, declares, “Hollywood has been the worst violator of Title VII—even worse than coal mining.” She’s referring to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlaws employment discrimination on the basis of race, religion, national origin, and sex. Indeed, the number of women directors of the top 200 box office films of the year have remained consistently low for the past two decades. However, far from becoming a screed, Brainwashed turns cautiously optimistic, pointing to Chloe Zhao’s Best Director Oscar win (Nomadland) as a sign of change.

This positive outlook may be well placed when looking beyond the corporate-run studios. For the major international film festivals, the number of women directors in the official competition is hit and miss. At the 2021 Venice Film Festivals, four women were competing for the Golden Lion out of 21 titles. However, at Sundance 2022, 60 percent of the U.S. Dramatic Competition and 80 percent of the U.S. Documentary Competition were made by women.