Women Take the Reel festival deconstructs gender and film

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For Burton, this filming choice was about working with what they know.

“I think that we really are engaging with the material that we know in really direct ways,” Burton said. “When we were talking with Ayodele, so much of it was really about taking these steps and embodying them, and embodying history.”

Casel taps her way through an unseen history, bringing to light both her skill and the skill of those who came before her.

Following the short film came “Brainwashed,” a lecture-turned-documentary directed by Nina Menkes. The doc was adapted from Menkes’ “cinematic experience” lecture, “Sex and Power: The Visual Language of Oppression.” With over 175 movie clips ranging from 1896–2020, the film is a truly visual experience. Through this cinematic exploration, Menkes reveals how ideas of women have become embedded in our culture through the visual grammar of cinema — including lighting, framing, angles and movement — thus contributing to sexual and employment discrimination in the film industry.

Men and women are filmed differently, Menkes believes. These are differences you may not have noticed before, but they are pervasive cinematic techniques. She breaks it down into the simplest of terms: subject and object. Men look, women are looked at. Often, women’s bodies are chopped up by camera framing into fragmented body parts — reducing them to the body parts taking up the screen. If not fragmented, their bodies are on general display for the audience. This effect can be augmented by camera movement, like slow pans along a woman’s passive body.

Lighting also contributes to this distorted vision of women; men are typically depicted in what Menkes calls 3D lighting, putting all their scraggles and wrinkles in full view. Women, however, are placed in 2D, fuzzy lighting, reducing them to picturesque, unblemished versions of humans. Menkes affirms that these filmic traits are rooted in

Saba S. and Jack Clohisy Queeries

the “male gaze,” a term first coined by Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”

The rest of Menkes’ thesis revolves around this concept of the male gaze, which refers to the depiction of women as seen by the male spectator. The film is interspersed with various interviews with women in the industry, including Julie Dash, Eliza Hittman and Mulvey herself — the “original gangster” film theorist, according to Menkes. Mulvey herself admits that she only mentioned the male gaze once in her essay, but “it’s become its dominant memory.” Yet, Menkes continues to employ this concept to show that male and female power dynamics are encoded in cinematic language, affecting women’s place both in front of and beyond the camera.

The documentary shows nearly 200 films throughout its length. One after the other, Menkes breaks down the shot design of fan-favorite films, revealing their sexist connotations.

For Burton, it was this repetition that made the film so effective.

“So often, we’ll get into the complexity of it all,” Burton said. “There was something really powerful to me about just saying, ‘It’s here, it’s here, it’s here.’”

This repetition certainly serves its purpose. By the end of the film, you will understand just how invasive these portrayals are throughout cinematic history.

Many of the scenes surround the subject of desire and sex. Shots are pulled from films like “Eyes Wide Shut” (1999) and “Titane” (2021), which undoubtedly cover matters of sex. When dealing with scenes that surround the topic of desire, they will tend to be shot in a more consistent and predictable way — whether that be slow-motion sex scenes or provocative dancing. Menkes’ point was better proved when she showed film scenes that weren’t inherently sexual in the context of the narrative.

One such example was Brian de Palma’s “Carrie” (1976), whose opening credit scene consists of naked teenage girls prancing around their locker room and taking steamy showers. Not necessarily crucial to the story, huh?