In the 1970s art historians such as John Berger and Linda Nochlin looked hard at paintings and saw that male painters such as Goya frame women as sexual  objects while female painters such as Mary Cassatt frame them as social subjects. In the 1990s sociolinguists such as Deborah Tannen listened hard to spouses and business colleagues in conversation. She heard men speak a language of status and independence and women speak and hear a language of connection and intimacy. Before many of these efforts exploring whether modes of communication and perception are perhaps gender-linked, film theorist Laura Mulvey 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, and update, Mulvey’s theory by comparing and contrasting similarly-themed films by male and female directors. Students will parse different elements of moviemaking from editing and average-shot duration to framing and point-of-view to explore whether the filmmaking is gender-linked. Films considered span from the silent-era melodramas “True Heart Susie” by D.W. Griffith and “The Blot” by Lois Weber to late-20th films such as Heat by Michael Mann and “Point Break” by Kathryn Bieglow.