Deconstructing the male gaze

Nina Menkes talks to Alexandra Zawia about her stirring film BRAINWASHED: SEX-CAMERA-POWER in which she shows how "shot design" (camera angles, etc., in other words: the visual grammar of cinema) incessantly reproduces the patriarchal narrative, the "male gaze" and thus sexism, discrimination and abuse of (especially) women in society and the film industry. Like a "brainwashing," this view is so deeply inscribed in the collective consciousness, the "collective seeing," that Menkes deliberately wants to counter it with her polemic: "We are not trying to present a balanced view on the male gaze," she says in the podcast. "We are trying to balance a 120 years of the male gaze on our backs!"