There’s at all times a lot to debate throughout Ladies’s Historical past Month it’s onerous to know the place to start.
So let’s begin with the present state of our business. In line with this yr’s The Celluloid Ceiling report, there’s not a lot that’s newsworthy. For instance, there have been fewer movies directed by girls in comparison with 2020, and nonetheless far too many inequities in behind-the-camera crafts—solely 6 % of the highest 250 motion pictures in 2021 had feminine cinematographers, and solely 17 % had been edited by girls.
However when you dig beneath the floor you’ll uncover much less apparent types of inequity—some so delicate that even girls filmmakers haven’t taken discover.
It’s why we really feel particularly fortunate to have found Nina Menkes’ new characteristic documentary, BRAINWASHED: Intercourse-Digital camera-Energy, which premiered at Sundance 2022. Directed, shot, and edited by girls, it shines a vibrant mild on the darkly harmful trope referred to as “the male gaze,” and when you see it, you’ll by no means take a look at the best way feminine characters are filmed the identical approach once more.
Not less than, that’s what Nina, and her editor, Cecily Rhett, hope.
What’s the male gaze?
Feminist movie critic Laura Mulvey coined the time period in an essay entitled “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which was revealed in 1975—approach earlier than there was an web.
Except you had been a critical cinephile or movie college scholar, there was little likelihood you’d have found it.
Within the essay, Mulvey examined the depiction of ladies in quite a few movies spanning cinema historical past. The extra she watched, the extra she noticed the distinction between how feminine characters are portrayed to intentionally objectify them for the pleasure of male protagonists and viewers.
Nina, herself a feminist filmmaker and a present teacher at CalArts, not solely found Mulvey’s work, however has furthered and amplified it. “Over twenty years I developed a lecture for my college students that illustrated my understanding about shot design and the established cinematic canon,” she says. “This presentation advanced—annually I added new clips and new insights.”
Quick ahead about 40 years. With the eruption of the #MeToo motion, Nina’s 2017 essay “The Visual Language of Oppression: Harvey Wasn’t Working in a Vacuum” for Filmmaker Journal went viral. Because of this, she was invited to current her lecture on the Sundance Black Home in 2018, the place it was a smash hit, and numerous attendees recommended she flip her lecture into a movie.
BRAINWASHED is the product of two-and-a-half years of labor, as Nina culled by way of the previous century of movie historical past to assist her thesis. In her artist’s assertion, Nina describes the movie as “exposing a harsh, interlacing system of oppression which incorporates this gendered system of visible language, the still-ongoing epidemic of sexual harassment and assault, and employment discrimination in opposition to girls—particularly within the movie business.”
With interviews starting from movie students to business professionals working at this time, Nina sheds mild on how deeply these tropes are ingrained in cinematic language—and the way they hurt girls in areas that stretch properly past the massive display, inciting violence in opposition to them and jeopardizing their profession alternatives.
Triple threats
As a self-contained filmmaker who directs, shoots, and edits her personal work, Nina thought she would minimize BRAINWASHED herself. However it quickly grew to become clear that the duty was too massive.
So she referred to as on former USC scholar and instructing assistant, Cecily Rhett, to assist her by way of the method. Cecily’s background is almost as diverse as Nina’s. After Columbia undergraduate, she discovered herself in movie college as an extension of her love for experimental theater and has been a working editor, author, and instructor since.
Cecily initially turned Nina down. “I hadn’t completed a lot documentary modifying apart from the present Biography,” she says. “However that’s completely different, in that it’s at all times a linear, chronological story. I didn’t actually suppose I used to be the correct individual for the job.”
Nina persuaded Cecily to return on board, which she did in October 2020—on the top of the pandemic. This meant, after all, that the staff was by no means bodily collectively till the very day that they locked the minimize. All through the post-production course of, the staff needed to design a workflow that allowed them to remain in sync creatively whereas working remotely.
Clipping alongside
Even earlier than Cecily joined, publish supervisor Jim Rosenthal had already been utilizing Adobe Premiere Professional on BRAINWASHED for plenty of causes.
Chief amongst them was the best way that Premiere Professional helped them take care of the tons of of clips they needed to ingest. All new materials was transcoded to ProRes proxies internally, and from there they discovered it very straightforward to check the clips.
The extra intricate graphic parts (created by design studio Compost) play a major position within the movie to assist illustrate and underscore Nina’s thesis. The less complicated titles, nonetheless, had been created in Premiere Professional, which allowed them to scale them up with out dropping high quality—so long as that was completed within the Sequence and never the Export setting. After Results was used for shot patching and comping, or for modifying fundamental visible results.
However maybe most importantly, Nina was additionally modifying together with Cecily—from her dwelling. The 2 relied on Jim and their assistant editors, Maria Freire and Juliet Janklow, to maintain three units of mirrored drives present and ship them to each.
“We had numerous individuals suggesting and sending clips to us,” Cecily says. “Premiere Professional makes it straightforward to simply seize an asset and begin slicing with it. However then the assistant must are available to be sure that Nina had precisely the identical clips, named precisely the identical approach, so we might ship the challenge forwards and backwards. We needed to be very disciplined to maintain our drives mirrored.”
When Nina first offered her Sundance 2018 speak, it contained roughly 15 movie clips. Within the last minimize of BRAINWASHED, there have been 175 —culled down from many extra potentialities. “We checked out and labored with a lot materials, it ended up being a great system for us,” Cecily says.
It was not till the ultimate conform section that the method grew to become extra sophisticated. “We relied on Honest Use legal guidelines for the movie clips, so we frequently didn’t have masters with timecode. The whole lot needed to be eye-matched and audio matched with out it,” she explains.
All the attention matching and prep for the net took nearly three months. “I don’t suppose anybody embarks on a challenge like this figuring out how intense it’s going to be,” Cecily says. “Jim began off as one in all our assistant editors however moved into the publish supervisor place after we realized that we badly wanted him to tackle these tasks.”
One other vital element of the movie required that Nina seize plenty of new interviews, which had been primarily dealt with by DP Shana Hagan, ASC. Capturing at UHD on an assortment of cameras, from RED to Canon C300 to Sony FX6s additionally meant that, once they lastly handed off the locked edit to FotoKem’s Mike Sowa for grading, Jim needed to give him each an XML and an AAF. In line with Jim, “For some cause, RED does higher with AAF and all the pieces else appears to go extra easily with XML, so we needed to make sure that as a lot as potential, the edit translated correctly into Resolve.”
Inventive shorthand
Each documentary comes with challenges, however some are trickier than others.
Changing what is basically a lecture into a movie is already one problem. Incorporating 175 movie clips is one other. However once you add practically two dozen interviews into the combination, the problem will increase exponentially.
Particularly when these interviews are with such achieved and articulate administrators, students, actors, and psychologists together with Laura Mulvey, Julie Sprint, Joey Soloway, Catherine Hardwicke, Rosanna Arquette, Penelope Spheeris, Amy Ziering, and so many extra. It’s a humiliation of riches.
As a result of Cecily and Nina knew one another so properly, they had been capable of efficiently work collectively even at a distance. The 2 additionally used an software referred to as Dynalist to create a paper edit of the transcripts. “We did that so we’d be on the identical wavelength earlier than I began spending plenty of time slicing after which have Nina say, ‘Nicely, that simply doesn’t work or make sense.’ We’d lay all the pieces out on paper after which have an enormous dialogue. It was collaborative so we might trip earlier than transferring on to slicing image,” Cecily says.
The 2 additionally had epic FaceTime periods. “I might put my cellphone down and edit after which choose it again up and we’d speak. We did that nearly daily.”
Working collectively for greater than a yr, Nina and Cecily pieced the narrative collectively. And the ultimate result’s, whereas deeply disturbing, additionally genuinely eye-opening. “BRAINWASHED is a journey to the underworld of objectification that can be resulting in a liberation of perspective,” Cecily says.
Seeing is believing
As you watch BRAINWASHED, it turns into apparent that “the male gaze” is pervasive all through film historical past.
Take a look at the shadowy lighting Orson Wells makes use of to disembody Rita Hayworth in The Woman From Shanghai. Or Alfred Hitchcock’s gauzy therapy of Kim Novak in Vertigo.
Then there’s Brian DePalma’s slow-motion bathe sequence that serves because the title sequence in Carrie. And Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, by which his feminine lead may be seen however not heard. All are blatant examples of the best way the administrators objectify their feminine characters.
“However these are outdated motion pictures,” you may say. The reality is that whilst sturdy feminine characters—superheroes, Bond women, and unhealthy women like Harley Quinn—have more and more populated latest movies, they nonetheless get the identical therapy.
It’s turn out to be so ingrained within the cinematic lexicon that even a few of our extra notable modern feminine administrators mimic what their male counterparts have created.
Look, for instance, on the opening of Sofia Coppola’s Misplaced in Translation. The digital camera pans slowly throughout Scarlett Johansson’s underwear-clad backside as she lies on the mattress. Or at Titane, directed by Julia Ducournau, by which she factors the digital camera immediately on the feminine lead’s crotch throughout a sequence of her performing a lewd dance on the hood of a automobile.
The truth that Harvey Weinstein’s abusive therapy of ladies throughout the business catapulted these points into the mainstream dialog solely begins to reveal the results they undergo.
Nina consists of one poignant interview with actor Rosanna Arquette, who speaks about each objectification and ageism. As a younger girl, her character is depicted as an object of want, even whereas apparently useless, in Martin Scorsese’s After Hours. Extra lately, she (together with so many ladies in Hollywood) has all however misplaced her profession, the results of being “too outdated” to be bankable, a euphemism for desireable. If that doesn’t illustrate the issue, nothing will.
Shifting perspective
So how does the business change what appears so irreparable?
Nicely, first it begins with girls within the business. As a director, Nina’s movies are consultant of the methods by which a feminine character may be depicted on display not as an object however as a topic. Included in BRAINWASHED are clips from her movies Queen of Diamonds and Phantom Love, together with examples from famend administrators Chantal Ackerman and Agnes Varda.
For Cecily, it begins with selecting her initiatives extra judiciously. There was a time within the early 2000s throughout which Cecily was an editor on The Bachelor, about as non-feminist a present as exists. After that stint, she stepped away from modifying to pursue writing and instructing for practically a decade.
Since her return, “I’ve been lucky sufficient to work with a few of the coolest girls in tv,” Cecily says. “Kerry Ehrin [The Morning Show], Raelle Tucker [True Blood], Jami O’Brien [NOS4A2], who’re creating exhibits with girls characters who’re photographed and depicted as the themes of their tales.”
At the moment, Cecily is ending up The Factor About Pam, a criminal offense drama starring Renée Zellweger, with one other of the ladies showrunners cementing their locations within the mainstream—Jenny Klein.
That mentioned, there are nonetheless so many different segments of the business which have a protracted method to go. BRAINWASHED doesn’t even start to the touch on, for instance, music movies or video games.
“In the event you’ve ever felt just a little bit much less, or just a little bit alienated strolling out of a film, that wasn’t simply you.”
Cecily feels inspired, nonetheless. Lately, she and her 12-year-old daughter watched Apollo 13. “My daughter mentioned, ‘That is sexist. I don’t wish to watch this.’ And I noticed that there was no consciousness on the a part of the filmmakers that these guys are out in area and the ladies are sitting round of their pink clothes crying,” Cecily says. “Pondering again, my very own feminist mom should have been horrified that I used to be watching motion pictures like Flashdance after I was a youngster.”
Making BRAINWASHED wasn’t straightforward. However it was gratifying. “The movie has introduced me to a deep place of understanding about how a lot there may be to discover when it comes to how being objectified impacts us in our lives,” Cecily says. “In the event you’ve ever felt just a little bit much less, or just a little bit alienated strolling out of a film, that wasn’t simply you. It’s helped me give attention to what I’ve inherited and what I’m making an attempt to not go on.”
Can one film change a complete business? After all not. Is it important viewing for the present and future generations of filmmakers? Completely.
As we’ve seen from the statistics, change occurs slowly and incrementally. But when this film helps girls filmmakers achieve extra entry and fairness to inform their tales the best way they wish to, and helps male filmmakers turn out to be allies, Nina and Cecily will take their locations in girls’s historical past as not simply displaying the issue, however being a part of the answer.
