Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power

Nina Menkes
2022, 107', 15+

In English with Slovenian subtitles

Free admission

Building upon her influential talk, Sex and Power: The Visual Language of Cinema (2018), and her article The Visual Language of Oppression: Harvey Wasn’t Working in a Vacuum (2017), director Nina Menkes examines the politics of cinematic shot design, and shows how the perception of women has become unconsciously embedded in our heads by the visual language of cinema – through lighting, framing, camera angles, and movement. Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power further portrays how this meta-level of filmmaking intersects with the “twin epidemics” of sexual abuse/assault, and employment discrimination against women in the film industry. To support her claims, the director employs over eighty movie clips from the period 1896–2020.

For me, cinema is sorcery, a creative way to interact with the world in order to rearrange perception and expand consciousness, both that of the viewers and my own.

– Nina Menkes

The event is also part of the Autumn Film School.

At 19.00, the programme will continue with the roundtable Oppositional (In)sights, followed by the Slovenian Short Film Programme at 21.00.

Organisation: Slovenian Cinematheque, Ekran and City of Women in cooperation with the Slovenian branch of the International Federation of Film Critics FIPRESCI. The event is part of the project Power, funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union.