Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power

As a filmmaker and as a woman,

I found myself drowning in a powerful vortex

of visual language,

from which it is very difficult to escape.

Yeah, Lara, are you there?

I'm just sitting here hoping to hear from you,

I don't care if it's three o'clock in the morning

because, I've been thinking about all the things

that could possibly happen to you because of this,

and I don't want you to ruin

your whole acting career over it.

You know, all they have to do is call sag

and pull your card and from now on,

for the rest of your life,

you'll come up not cleared for work and that's the end.

This visual language, this cinematic visual language,

dictates to us ways of seeing

that are so specific, it almost feels like a law.

The great writer James Baldwin once said,

"not everything can be changed,

but nothing can be changed until it is faced."

What we're gonna do today is look at a series of film clips

from a list movies,

the ones that win cannes and the academy awards,

as well as cult classics, and other notable works.

And what we're looking at is how shot design is gendered.

That means that male lead actors and female actresses

are filmed very differently,

consistently differently and consistently in a certain way

that can be labeled and tracked and named.

Now, I personally see a very clear connection

between this visual language of cinema,

employment discrimination against women,

particularly in the film industry,

and an environment of pervasive sexual harassment, abuse,

and assault.

I had the chance to meet Laura mulvey last year,

the "original gangster" film theorist

who identified the male gaze for all of us.

I only actually used the male gaze once in the essay,

I think, but it's become its dominant memory.

The essay really came out of my love of cinema.

Well, having left university in 1963,

I really spent a lot of my time just going to the movies.

Only retrospectively realizing that part of my pleasure

in this film going was that I was watching these movies

as a male spectator.

Almost all of us are familiar with the phrase

the objectification of women,

but it's worth taking a moment to break that down.

What exactly is an object and what is a subject?

So let's get back to basic grammar

in like an English sentence for a second.

The cat eats the mouse.

The cat is the subject,

he's eating the mouse,

the object is acted upon.

Similarly, the man sees the woman,

the man is active doing the locking

and the woman is looked at.

Here she comes.

We'd like a statement from you...

This phrase, to-be-looked-at-ness,

was made famous by Laura mulvey back in 1975

and used to describe the basic essential position

of women in cinema.

That dress will be ahead of fashion a hundred years

from today.

You ain't seen nothing yet.

The accessories are even cuter.

J” I can hear the river call j“

j” no return, no return j“

Through time, the woman's body

becomes more and more sexuahzed,

but the basic structure of looking remains the same.

Even though mulvey's foundational work

was written in the '705,

we still totally normalize the male gaze in cinema.

You know, I think the majority of people

don't ever really question that form of looking.

It's so normal it's like the idea of a fish asking

if it's wet.

It's the stuff that I think you thought,

and maybe I thought, well, everybody knows this,

it's in the ether, but it's the ether.

And so to name it and to show it is, you know,

something that I believe can change the world.

The poet philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson

once made a beautiful remark that I feel speaks very well

to the situation.

He said, "perception is not whimsical, but fatal.“

you know, this is something that people like to say,

like they think creative work and films are whimsical.

It's just my vision. It's just my idea. It's whimsical,

but no, it's really serious.

It's fatal, and it impacts us on the deepest possible level.

As filmmakers we have to be courageous

and be willing to be that force.

Willing to speak our minds,

willing to say, "hey, wait a minute,

what's wrong with this picture?

What are you telling me?

What's the visual rhetoric that we're looking at?

It doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel correct.

Let's rethink this."

I think sometimes with films that are considered

part of the canon, part of, you know,

what are the best quote unquote films,

there is a reticence to even question how they were made

and the stories that they tell.

And I think that it's okay to still love and to see a film

and say it's great,

but that it has some issues.

And I think without questioning it,

we're doing a disservice to our own humanity.

Now most of you guys are probably aware

of the idea that there's a sexist element to script,

dialogue, and character.

You know, we know that we'd prefer not to see women

always playing a maid or a sexy babe,

as opposed to being a ceo or something like that.

That's something that we're well acquainted with.

What's less well known is how shot design itself

is perpetuating these different positions of power.

So when we talk about shot design,

what exactly does that mean?

We're talking about subject, object,

the visual relationship,

framing, camera movement, and lighting,

and how all of these techniques

contribute to the narrative position of the characters.

So the first thing is subject, object.

When we see a shape like this,

we know it means that this guy here is looking

at this person over here,

who happens to be a woman.

- Haven't I seen you somewhere before?

This pov shot can be done in one shot, like this.

It's dropping down. We need to get that adjusted.

It's ridiculous.

I should just drop my brushes, and just, fuck it. Oh!

It's amazing what do you think about that, man?

Pretty amazing. Jerry! Jerry!

Or in two separate shots.

Hey!

I think a lot about how to create points of view.

It's not just optical, it's perceptual,

you know, we are experiencing the...

You're putting the audience in the character's shoes

so that they aren't just seeing directly

what the character sees,

but they are aligned with them emotionally

and in their thought process.

What's interesting about Robert Montgomery's,

"lady in the lake" is that it's an extreme example

of what subjectivity is.

So it becomes this point of view shot

throughout the whole film.

It aligns with my ideas about a male point of view

and what is the male gaze.

And about sort of the image of a certain kind

of Hollywood beauty or Hollywood victim.

Framing of shots.

Women actors are often shot with fragmented body parts.

And that fragmented body can be part of, of course,

a pov situation.

So you have one shot somebody is looking,

second shot, fragmented body.

What is that noise?

What noise?

Really, sir, there wasn't any noise.

Or it can be in one shot.

And again, repeating the pov structures.

Another thing that's very common is a female body

on direct display for the audience

without a specific person looking.

This is just like general audience display.

I think we have to consider

that it is through the formal visual language

that we are effectively communicating meaning.

And we inherit so much subliminally

that comes from this language

and it has to do with how shots are composed and framed,

how they're assembled and ordered in a sequence of shots.

All of that becomes the grammar and syntax

by which meaning is conveyed to a viewer.

So in a visual culture, such as ours,

in which there's a ravenous appetite

towards the female as object,

if the camera is predatory

then the culture is predatory as well.

Camera movement.

A common thing that we've all seen a million times

is a pan of a female body.

And that can, of course, be a horizontal pan

or a vertical pan.

Furthermore, what you very often see is slow-mo,

as a way to emphasize.

And with men, when do we get slow-mo?

Action, military, right?