Are we Brainwashed? Confronting the male gaze of cinema

Tanja Rusi, Nina Menkes, Pihla Viitala and Vishnu Vardhani Rajan during the panel discussion.

The topic of representation is yet again brought to the forefront with filmmaker Nina Menkes’ (Magdalena Viraga, Queen of Diamonds) new documentary Brainwashed: Sex - Camera - Power. Menkes, also a teacher at California Institute of Arts, analyzes the ways in which women have been sexualized and objectified throughout the overwhelmingly male-dominated film history. This is showcased via poignant clips from some of the most highly regarded works in cinema, from Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers (2019). She underlines the extremely narrow way women are allowed to exist on film focusing on the visual language of cinema through lighting, framing, camera movement and how it contributes to the narrative position of the woman on screen. The documentary goes on to connect this tradition of depicting women to employment discrimination in Hollywood and the sexual harassment women face overall. 

The documentary is based on a talk called “Sex and Power; The Visual Language of Oppression” that Menkes toured with during 2018-2019. The film shows parts of these talks that took place in theaters and cinemas. They had a simple yet incredibly effective visual element: as clips were projected on a screen, Menkes would sit on one of the three movie theater seats placed on the stage. She is simultaneously part of the audience and also part of the clip, showing the juxtaposition of being a woman viewing a film made through the male gaze. This is where the true strength of the documentary comes forth - the impact this kind of representation has on an individual. The audience reactions to the film during the Q&A’s and personal feedback Menkes would receive after screenings would confirm this.

This is a film that needed to be made - In the wake of #metoo

WIFT Finland and Helsinki International Film Festival organized a panel discussion during the festival with the documentary as the topic. In addition to Menkes herself, the panelists included actor Pihla Viitala and performance artist - filmmaker Vishnu Vardhani Rajan. The discussion was moderated by the film’s line producer Tanja Rusi. Menkes and producer Inka Rusi also participated in multiple Q&A sessions throughout the film festival, two of which were moderated by the writer of this article.

During the panel discussion, Menkes mentioned that the idea to make a documentary didn’t come from her, as she is a narrative film maker. After her talks, she would receive numerous pleas from attendees to turn them into a movie: “This is a film that needed to be made.”

One of the starting points for Brainwashed was also an article Menkes wrote back in 2017, at the height of the #MeToo movement. During the discussion, Viitala spoke about her experience of speaking out about harassment she had faced on set. She recalled how quickly the public discourse turned the accused male filmmaker into the victim. “The evolution is so slow”, she remarked. “Why is there no development?”

Rajan also shared her story: she recalls that during a volunteer party after a film festival, an incident with a participating filmmaker occurred. When she told about this to the festival director, an award they had given to the filmmaker was taken away. Rajan believes that this could be an example of the #MeToo movement starting to have an impact.

Going against the grain:
“When I die, I won’t have any money - But I’ll have my integrity”

Menkes was asked if she was afraid to come out with the film. She admitted to being hesitant about making the film, as the subject material included clips from and thus can be seen as criticizing the film canon, the “masterpieces”. However, Menkes herself points out that some of the movies used in Brainwashed are her personal favorites, and she is not asking anyone to cancel the films - she is aiming to make the audience aware of how the visual language works when it comes to depicting women. Menkes’ documentary has already brought forth change in the industry. In an interview with YLE, she revealed that her film had influenced the selection committee's choices for the line-up at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. 

Menkes shared a surprising aspect of the criticism she had received for her film: many female film critics had attacked it. These attacks range from calling the film “puritanical” to accusations of “wanting to cancel sex”. During a later Q&A session with producer and WIFT Finland board member Inka Rusi, we discussed the motives of these criticisms further. Rusi mentioned that due to the nature of the industry, many of the critics probably have connections that they do not want to risk offending. We also theorized that this could be a defensive reaction: if the problem of representation is and has been this extensive, why hasn’t it been called out before? It’s often easier to ignore the problem itself and criticize the one trying to bring it to light than confronting it.

Menkes sees this as a continuation to the struggles the documentary had faced - how at every stage of the filmmaking process from funding to critiques, it was as if there were attempts to stop the movie from being made. “I have paid a really big price for it”, Menkes said about going against the grain in the film industry. “When I die, I won’t have any money - but I will have my integrity.”

Menkes commented that the reception in Helsinki for her film has been very encouraging: the film was so popular that three screenings were sold out and an extra one had to be added. 

The object position is a powerless position

Rajan brought up how the financing model in the film industry differs between the Nordic countries and the US and India, specifically how a great share of culture is funded by public money. Viitala remarked how this creates a vital opportunity to bring forth a real change, such as the Swedish Film Institute requiring filmmakers to take a course on sexual harrassment in order to receive public funding. She also pointed out how this way one could not be able to excuse themselves by claiming they “didn’t know” what sexual harrasment is.

The documentary also showed how in the United States there is a near-even split between genders (in a binary model) among film students, but when it comes to actually making films, the women disappear from the industry. Moderator Rusi brought up how this is a global phenomenon that is present even in Finland - it was one of the findings in Aalto University’s and WIFT Finland’s Action!-project.

Menkes states that those who get to make the films, also decide “who gets to be a whole, full subject”. Referring to one of the themes in the film, the subject-object split, she further remarked that “the object position is a powerless position”. 

She also brought up how objectification, in an extreme example, can be a dangerous tool: it was used against the Jewish population in order to dehumanize them during the Holocaust. She argues that sexual harrassment, rape and employment discrimination are all tied to objectification - and that the language of cinema perpetuates that “women are objects”. Studies back up this notion, as for example a 2016 article presents that “sexual assault is a related, but more extreme manifestation of sexual objectification”.

“You can keep the baby, but please don’t gain any kilos” - Controlling the female body

Viitala shared a harrowing tale of working as a female actor. She recalled the comments she received from her agent when she announced her pregnancy: “You can keep the baby, but please don’t gain any kilos”. These comments reflect the on-going scrutiny that is placed on female bodies to maintain an artificial depiction of them. Rajan pointed out how the objectification in cinema is yet another symptom of the same disease that is at the core of atrocities like the ones happening in Iran: “It’s all about control over the female body”. 

Menkes was asked about her thoughts on self-objectification, especially among young girls on social media. She mentioned how studies show that girls who participated in it had more tolerance towards sexual assaults and more body insecurity, among other negative effects. Menkes posed the question: “Why do you feel that’s a way to be valued, where did you get that idea?” She further comments how girls see actors like Ana de Armas in movies such as Blonde gain value from the objectification, which can naturally lead to wanting to emulate that. She posits that self-objectification might not be the perfectly harmless, empowering phenomenon one would think it is. If a choice of self-expression is identical to the objectified depiction of women throughout the male-dominated film history, how much of a free choice is it? Is that choice born in a vacuum? 

This poses an important question: as more and more of us become creators of audiovisual content on our own social media, we all partake in framing, shaping or upholding the visual language and narratives. Will there be a change in the tradition of representation? Or will the old conventions be amplified even further?'

Can we be deprogrammed?

Menkes calls this system of representation “the bedrock language of rape culture”. Not only is women’s agency taken away in how they look and how they are portrayed, but also in how they are intimate. The documentary shows clip after clip of scenes where there is no consent on the woman’s part, yet the music and the narrative of the scene imply that this is romantic, this is acceptable.

Circling back to the effects the sexualised and objectified representation has on an individual, the need for this discussion was highlighted by the audience reactions. “How do you stop objectifying yourself?” was one of the many questions asked during the Q&A’s. Menkes also shared that after screenings, she has had people come up to her in tears, thanking her for making the film and helping them realize how much the fictional portrayal of women had affected them. Audience members would comment how enlightening they found the film, and producer Inka Rusi also mentioned how after working on it, she can not watch movies the same way anymore. And further, after Brainwashed, it’s even more difficult to justify making them the same way.

Part of the power of Brainwashed comes from the fact that it’s made by a filmmaker. When a filmmaker calls out an industry-wide phenomenon, there are no more excuses. 

No longer can one hide behind calling this kind of representation a passive phenomenon that just happens to exist - these are choices, subconscious or not. Nor can one hide behind calling it mere subjective artistic expression - what artistic expression is the kind that is identical to every other film? There are actual and devastating consequences in this narrow way of portraying women - and other marginalized groups, as Menkes pointed out both during discussions and in the film. 

For a thriving, inspiring and touching cinematic culture, it needs to be able to reflect the world as it is. Confining one’s expression to such a limited depiction of humanity must be suffocating to not only the viewers but also the creators. It’s time to deprogram. 

Taija Säkkinen
taija.sakkinen@wift.fi
The writer works at Women in Film & Television Finland.

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