Profs and Pints Online presents: “How Films Imagine Creative Women,” a critical look at movie depictions of powerful women in the arts, with Peter Lehman, professor emeritus of film and media studies at Arizona State University and scholar of film and gender issues.

[ This talk will remain available in recorded form at the link given here for tickets and access.]

What is it like to be a powerful creative woman working in a male-dominated field?  Do depictions of such women by the male-dominated film industry begin to do them justice, or just echo the same gender oppression they would have experienced?

You might view some movies through a much different lens after hearing such questions tackled by Peter Lehman, a leading scholar of gender in film who in January gave an excellent Profs and Pints talk on film portrayals of male nudity.

Professor Lehman will also look at not just how the films portray powerful, creative women, but how they depict men who oppress or are supportive of them. He’ll examine how writers and directors make the decisions that drive such films, and what role filmmakers’ own gender and sexual orientation plays in shaping the final product.  And he’ll discuss how the time periods in which films are set, produced, and shown all influence what we see on the screen and how it is received.

He’ll analyze how gender and sexuality issues are handled in The Governess, about a Jewish woman who navigates anti-Semitism in nineteenth century Britain in finding a career as a portrait photographer; The Danish Girl, based upon the true story of a woman painter and her transgender husband; and Fur:  An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, a prominent American photographer.  He’ll also comment on the current Netflix film Agatha and the Truth of Murder, an imaginary account of what happened during the actual brief disappearance of detective novelist Agatha Christie in 1926.

Profs & Pints Online: How Films Imagine Creative Women