College Colloquium

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Men Looking at Women: Gender and the Movies

As a form of highly controlled and regulated looking, the cinema has encouraged its audiences to look at the world in certain specific ways. During the last 30 years, feminist critics have called attention to ways in which the world that the cinema gives us may be shaped by the overwhelmingly male group of photographers, directors, producers, and financiers whose influence shapes this enormously popular social practice. This course will explore some of the claims made by feminist and other social critics of the movies as well as changes in representational strategies that have emerged in response to their views. In addition, by analyzing both a set of films and our collective responses to them, we will explore the degree to which our viewing habits conform to or escape from the shaping power of the images to which we so often surrender our eyes, our attention, and our time.

Course taught by

Ken Nolley