Building upon her acclaimed talk “Sex and Power: The Visual Language of Cinema”, and making use of feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey’s landmark thesis Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, director Nina Menkes compels the viewer to confront how the visual language of cinema (POV, framing, camera movement, lighting, and even sound design) has functioned to perpetuate the sexist binary throughout cinematic history and is used to disempower women at the most fundamental level. A deep dive into cinema history, using more than 175 film clips from canonical Hollywood favourites and cult classics, from 1896 through to the present, as well as interviews with filmmakers including Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust), Joey Soloway (Transparent), as well as scholars, Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power reveals a sinister framework of misogyny and paternalism that, from early cinema to the present day, infiltrates some of our best loved and most iconic films.

Notes by David O’Mahony