I had reservations about going to see Brainwashed: Sex – Camera – Power, Nina Menkes’ take on ‘the male gaze’ at the BFI, partly because it seemed like the kind of thing that would turn up on BBC4 or Sky Arts in a month or two, but there is a certain advantage to seeing it on the big screen, since it reminds us of the power the images under discussion exert. Menkes’ argument is an emotional one first and foremost, in spite of its origins in academia (Laura Mulvey) – it is an expression of sadness and anger.
The thesis here is that women and men tend to be photographed in different ways, with women shown as object, men as subject. Women on film become unreal, partial, and – Menkes maintains – this has an effect on the way they perceive themselves and on the way they are treated, notably in the film industry itself.
This is arguable, but the argument is forcefully made. And if it all feels like a bit of a lecture, well, it was based on one.
It has been pointed out that some of the film clips Menkes includes as examples of the male gaze deliberately critique it – notably a scene from Godard’s Contempt panning across Brigitte Bardot’s naked back, a comment on the commodification of the female form.
But her point is that such clever postmodern approaches still replicate the same imagery: another example of men having their cake and eating it. And, since a scene from Julia Ducornau’s Titane is included here, of women having men’s cake and eating it.
Although I’m getting a bit confused about who owns the cake now (is it me?) I’m pleased that Menkes doesn’t seem to be advocating censorship, preferring to encourage new ways of seeing, and she is ‘inclusive’ enough to see positive elements in a scene from Richard Fleischer’s 1975 film Mandingo, oft dismissed as trash.
Though Mandingo has its supporters, Emilio Vieyra’s The Curious Dr. Humpp is easier to dismiss as trash. It’s one version of 1967 Argentinian SF/horror film La Venganza Del Sexo, dubbed into American and sexed up (by unofficial ‘co-director’ Jerald Intrator) for the raincoat brigade – to whom Nina Menkes’ film, with its lurid title and many nude scenes, might also have played back in the day. The AGFA blu-ray happily includes both versions.
A deformed monster kidnaps young people, some in the act of having sex, and transfers them to the lab of the eponymous doctor (Aldo Barbero), who is studying the ‘sexual aberrations’ of women and derives an ‘extraction’ from their sexual encounters that, whatever its other possible uses, keeps him alive, when he is in fact a walking corpse under the control of a disembodied brain that speaks with a mittel-European accent.
He spends a lot of time merely watching his (mainly female) prisoners on closed-circuit TV screens, and we may wonder whether his motivations are purely scientific. ‘Let the lesbians share one room’, he tells his nurse (who is hopelessly in love with him). ‘I want to observe them’.
It seems likely that this kind of exploitation film would dive unapologetically into the male gaze, but here the male gaze is presented as a theoretically disinterested one belonging to a dead man (who undergoes the expected rapid decomposition at the end, just like Dracula).
Neither do the sex scenes always conform to Nina Menkes’ observations – we see a woman writhing in ecstasy on a bed, but the camera spends equal time panning down the ‘beefcake’ photos that adorn the wall beside her. And the journalist hero (Ricardo Bauleo) has to get through the climactic scenes in just his underwear.
But of course this isn’t a mainstream film and is rather eccentric even of its kind. The lumbering golem-like monster can apparently walk about in broad daylight and enter bars without attracting more than funny looks from the populace. Amusingly, a character has to consult an identikit drawing in a newspaper in order to confirm his sighting of the creature, which could hardly be more clearly a bizarre anomaly in daily life if it had a flashing light embedded in its forehead – which it does, actually.
A strange scene that brings Last Year In Marienbad to mind has the monster strumming a lute, while Dr. Humpp’s captives wander a mist-wreathed garden as if under a spell.
There is also plenty of routine misogyny on display – a bartender who noticed the giant monster with the flashing light on its head when it came into his bar to abduct a stripper, and has thereby become a key witness in the case, contributes some weak jokes about his (unseen) wife. And the nurse’s insane devotion to the curious* doctor makes her transformation into one of his zombies at the end little more than a confirmation of her lowly status as a female character.
But sex makes zombies of us all, and the film has a certain hypnotic fascination, perhaps more so in the sexed-up version, where the additional couplings bring a sense of drift away from narrative and towards dreamy abstraction.
Vengeanza is more plot-driven, but does its own riffing on the male gaze, notably in the oddly jolly opening credits, wherein cartoon eyes ogle a crude depiction of the female form.
In a sequence common to both films Dr. Zoide (as he is named in Vengeanza) takes a soldering iron to the side of his golem’s head on the operating table, but whereas in Humpp his target is ‘the nerves of the libido’, in Vengeanza it is ‘the ocular motor nerve’, the object being that ‘he’ll only see what I want’.
It isn’t quite clear in either film what the point of this intervention is, but in Vengeanza, there’s a kind of desperation about the need to make the monster ‘see what I want’. While we may assume that the doctor means ‘what I want him to see’, the truncated sentence (an accident of subtitling) has its own force, carrying a suggestion that the doctor wants his monster to confirm the legitimacy of his own desires by only seeing ‘what I want’.
The implication is that the male gaze has to be constructed – it isn’t a natural fact. Many horror films are ambivalent about the male gaze anyway, often presenting it as threatening – notably in the many scenes adopting the POV of an (invariably male) killer stalking an (invariably female) victim.
In Humpp/Vengeanza, when the camera adopts the monster’s POV, it’s in the scene where it enters the bar, and everyone is looking at it, another suggestion that it is the male gaze itself that is under scrutiny here – or it would be if the film had an idea in its head.
But if the male gaze may be adopted without the filmmaker’s conscious awareness, as Nina Menkes allows, so, perhaps, may its critique.
*Though probably just a nod to a notorious Swedish film of 1967 (I Am Curious, Yellow) the word ‘curious’ in the American title carries a pleasing double (or even triple) meaning, suggesting the doctor’s curiosity (both scientific and sexual) and the fact that he is undoubtedly a curious character.
‘Humpp’ is, it’s fair to say, less inspired.
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