“The way we see is everything,” says the independent US filmmaker Nina Menkes as I watch her, and she watches me, on a transatlantic video call.
Menkes is gearing up for the release of her new documentary, Brainwashed: Sex-Camera- Power, in the UK in May. Its subject is the male gaze: the hungry, objectifying way in which men have looked at women for centuries—though the term itself was both conceived and related to film in an essay that the British theorist Laura Mulvey wrote 50 years ago, titled “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”.