Twenty years ago, filmmaker Nina Menkes began to deliver a lecture as a member of the film faculty at the California Institute of the Arts, exploring a hypothesis she had long held instinctively but ...

A woman appears on camera, looking strategically desirable, clothed or nude. Kim Novak in “Vertigo”; Phoebe Cates in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”; the list is as long as film history itself. If ...