Cinema Seminar: “Shakespeare’s Sisters: Picturing Women Creatives in the Renaissance”
Presented by Naomi Miller, Professor Emerita, English and the Study of Women and Gender, Smith College
Film: PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE (dir. Céline Sciamma, 2020)
This program includes Naomi Miller's 7:00pm seminar, followed by a screening of PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE at approximately 8:00pm. Tickets are $13.50 for Amherst Cinema Members, $16.75 for students and seniors, and $18.50 for general admission.
About the seminar: In her recently co-edited collection of essays, Authorizing Early Modern European Women: From Biography to Biofiction, Naomi Miller focuses attention upon early modern European women as creators and practitioners—from saints to midwives to visual artists to writers. These women may have created their own visions, but their stories have since been “authored” and “authorized” by contemporary writers and filmmakers through biographies and biofictionalizations.
In PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE, both the female artist and the female subject in the film face social constraints that hinder their ability to create a portrait on canvas and maintain their own self-image. The film invites us to enter their world with our imaginations, experiencing their challenges and disappointments, dreams and desires, through the lens of our own creative aspirations.
Before viewing the film, audiences will consider the challenges of representing early modern women creatives. Learn more about the obstacles that women creatives in contemporary society face that may obscure or illuminate our appreciation for women creatives from earlier centuries. What insights and assumptions do contemporary audiences hold?
About the film: France, 1760. Marianne is commissioned to paint the wedding portrait of Héloïse, a young woman who has just left the convent. Because she is a reluctant bride-to-be, Marianne arrives under the guise of companionship, observing Héloïse by day and secretly painting her by firelight at night. As the two women orbit one another, intimacy and attraction grow as they share Héloïse’s first moments of freedom. Héloïse's portrait soon becomes a collaborative act of and testament to their love.
In 2022, PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE was voted the #30 best film of all time in the prestigious British Film Institute Sight and Sound poll.
Naomi Miller is Professor Emerita of English and the Study of Women & Gender at Smith College. Her interests include Shakespeare, early modern women authors, lyric poetry, and children’s literature. In 2016 she was awarded Smith’s Sherrerd Prize for Distinguished Teaching. In addition to scholarly articles, and pieces for The Chronicle of Higher Education, she has published an historical fiction novel, Imperfect Alchemist (2020), that launches her larger fiction series about women authors in early modern England called Shakespeare’s Sisters, as well as multiple books about Renaissance women authors and the early modern world. She has just completed a novel about Mary Wroth, the first woman to publish fiction and love poetry in Shakespeare’s England, called Strange Labyrinth.
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