Women In Hollywood Day School

Programmed in partnership with The Sir John Hurt Film Trust.

This course looks at the work women do in the American film industry, the way they are represented on screen, and the role they play as a key (albeit often neglected) audience for Hollywood movies. The focus will be on developments since the 1960s with reference to several hugely popular, highly influential and much-loved movies, ranging from Funny Girl (1968) and Annie Hall (1977) to Gravity (2013) and Wonder Woman (2017), and to the careers of particularly successful and impactful women such as Jane Fonda, Julia Roberts and Sherry Lansing.

In addition to the analysis of film clips, discussions will be based on the examination of various data sets and other sources (e.g. box office charts, streaming charts, employment statistics, audience surveys, posters, trailers, reviews). As one of the themes of this course is the perhaps somewhat surprising success of older actresses (in their 40s and 50s and beyond), especially in recent years, the course will also include a discussion of The Last Showgirl (a Gia Coppola movie written by Kate Gersten, starring two very different iconic performers: Pamela Anderson and Jamie Lee Curtis) which is being screened at Cinema City from 21 February onwards.

Peter Krämer is a Senior Research Fellow in Cinema & TV in the Leicester Media School at De Montfort University (Leicester, UK), and a regular guest lecturer at several other universities in the UK, Germany and the Czech Republic. He has written or edited twelve academic books, most recently American Graffiti: George Lucas, the New Hollywood and the Baby Boom Generation (Routledge, 2023). He has been involved in adult education for thirty-five years.