In the 1970s art historians such as John Berger and Linda Nochlin looked hard at paintings and saw that male artists such as Goya frame women as sexual objects while female artists such as Mary Cassatt frame them as social subjects. In the 1990s sociolinguists such as Deborah Tannen listened to spouses and colleagues in conversation and heard men speak a language of status and independence while women speak and hear a language of connection and intimacy. Before many of these efforts exploring whether modes of communication and perception are gender-linked, film theorist Laura Mulvey had proposed that classical Hollywood movies presumed that the spectator of the film was male and the spectacle female. She called this “The Male Gaze.” “Mars and Venus at the Movies” will test Mulvey’s theory by comparing and contrasting similarly themed films by male and female moviemakers. Students will parse different elements of moviemaking, from editing and average shot duration to framing and point-of-view to see if there is still a male gaze and whether its female counterpart is emerging.