From Psyche to Beyoncé: Myths and Women in Film and Television

Prof. Anat Zanger

The seminar will focus on different reincarnations of feminine myths in culture and cinema. How do we define myth and what is its function in the cinema? How have women been presented throughout the history of film, from modernism to post-modernism? Do films continue to produce the same images of women, albeit in a different guise? How can one define female stardom and how has it been written through the media over time? How is the woman characterized in Israeli cinema? These are the main issues with which the seminar is concerned. The cinematic and television texts that will be discussed in this framework through their various cultural, aesthetic, psychoanalytic and inter-textual contexts include: Breathless; Intolerance; Orpheus; Gentlemen Prefer Blondes ; Exotica; …and God Created Woman; Vertigo; Carmen; Bridget Jones's Diary; Sex and the City; The Little Mermaid; Her; Out of Sight; Ever Shot Anyone?; Jellyfish; Opportunities or Bluebeard and I; Fragile; Castles in the Sky (Migdalim Ba'avir); Downton Abbey; Top of the Lake; Sirens (Betulot, 2014-); Zaguri Imperia.