As part of the San Francisco Art Institute's Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series, this year's SFAI Film Department Restating Cinema Lecture will be delivered by Manohla Dargis on Saturday, April 25, 2009 at 7:30PM in SFAI's Lecture Hall, 800 Chestnut Street, San Francisco. This anticipated event is free and open to the public. Directions: http://www.sfai.edu/directions.Formerly a film writer at The Village Voice, a film critic for the Los Angeles Times, and an editor of the film section at LA Weekly, Manohla Dargis is currently one of the chief film critics at The New York Times. She has also written for a number of other publications, including Film Comment and Sight and Sound. Her talk will concern Hollywood's onscreen abandonment of women, contending that over the past two decades, major Hollywood studios have severely cut back on the number of movies they make about adult women. Most Hollywood movies are now overwhelmingly made by men, about men, and for men. The recent phenomenon of the so-called bromance, for example, consists in movies in which the primary onscreen relationships are homosocial (rather than homosexual), that is, either between two straight men (I Love You, Man) or among straight male friends (Superbad and Knocked Up). Effectively, the romance film—a genre historically associated with women—has become in recent years, Dargis will argue, a genre in which women play an increasingly marginal role.
