Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power (2022)
Important questions need meaningful debate, which means passionate advocacy, which means polemics that present carefully angled opinions as facts without balance. This isn't the system failing, it might be the system working – as long as the person getting the lecture recognizes it for what it is: One set of views to be thrown into the intellectual mulching machine, grist for the mill between your ears, to be endorsed or modified or just given the boot. Nina Menkes's documentary "Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power" describes the way images of women in film have made direct and very negative alterations to way society (meaning men) treats women in real life, and presents that topic not as a question for debate but as an established fact. Which is entirely its right, even though the correct term in this contested territory must remain "opinion," no matter how firm the assertion in the title.