Laura Mulvey

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Laura Mulvey is a British filmmaker and film theorist and author of the seminal feminist film theory article ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ published in 1975. From 1974 to 2013, she co-directed and co-wrote four avant-garde films, one TV movie and three documentaries with her collaborators Peter Wollen and Mark Lewis. Riddles of the Sphinxin particular is considered to be a benchmark feminist avant-garde film and is included on the BFI catalog.

Cristelle Maury is Associate Professor of English and Film Studies at Université Toulouse 2 Jean-Jaurès. Her research focuses on Hollywood and independent US cinema, through the lens of gender and sexuality studies. She has published articles on classical film noir, neo-noir and contemporary noir, and on the links between (feminist) film theory and practice. She has co-edited Women Who Kill in Film and Series of the Post-Feminist Era (2020) with David Roche. She is currently preparing a collected volume on the influence of feminist film theory on film and television with Hélène Charlery, and working on a monograph on contemporary women’s film noir.

David Roche is Professor of Film Studies at Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, a 2022-27 IUF Senior member and President of SERCIA. His recent publications include the monographs Arrival (2024) and Meta in Film and Television Series (2022), and the collected volumes Edgar Poe et ses motifs à l’écran (2023, with Vincent Souladié), Transnationalism and Imperialism: Endurance of the Global Western Film (2022, with Hervé Mayer) and Women Who Kill: Gender and Sexuality in Films and Series of the Post-Feminist Era (2020, with Cristelle Maury). He has published articles in Adaptation, Film Journal, Horror Studies, Miranda, Mise au point, Positif, Post-script and TV/Series. His current research focuses on the relationship between aesthetics and politics, with particular interest in the work of women directors in the scope of the FEMME ANR project.

David Roche: We generally start by asking everyone to tell us about their lives, background, education and jobs. We’d specifically like to know when, how and why you turned to academia and filmmaking. Anything you feel in your background that may explain or not how you became who you are.

Laura Mulvey: I’m very fortunate in my background. I grew up in an environment which valued women’s education; and women intellectuals were important and influential in my family. My great-grandmother, Alice Meynell, was a quite significant poet and essayist towards the end of the 19^th century and into the early years of the 20^th. My mother was a socialist intellectual. She went to Oxford in the late 1920s, which was unusual for women in those days. She, and my family more generally, were Francophile and Italianophile. My sister and I were both expected to learn French and Italian, not just at school but through exchanges when we were teenagers. For me, encountering life and culture in both countries, from our first family visit to France after the war, has always been extraordinarily special… enjoyable and formative. At school I wasn’t especially academic (unlike my sister) but I read a lot, really a lot, and I thought a lot. I went to Oxford in the early 1960s to read and study history. I didn’t do very well. I loved history but I found it difficult academically. I wasn’t an ‘achiever’. I didn’t dedicate myself to my work, found it hard to cope with the Oxford atmosphere and developed quite a serious ‘writer’s block’. So, after coming down in 1963, in a sense, I kind of dropped out of intellectual ambition.

I met my former husband and collaborator Peter Wollen aound the same time. Peter’s Oxford generation, in the late 1950s, had picked up the Cahiers du Cinéma’s ‘line’ on Hollywood. And with him and our circle of friends, I began to watch Hollywood movies. Cinema kind of became our life. We’d travel all over London to find films by the Hollywood greats, still screening in out-of-the-way cinemas. We’d go over to Paris to see films in the little cinemas along the left bank of the Seine. 

I rediscovered my intellectual life again under the influence of the Women’s Liberation Movement. In addition to important theoretical issues that were opened up in the discussion group I belonged to, feminism really shifted my relationship to cinema. I began to question my longstanding cinephilia – that visual fascination and narrative absorption into the magic of film. My old love of the cinema stayed with me but my way of experiencing cinema and thinking about cinema was radically transformed by new feminist ‘consciousness’. I began to watch films and think about what was happening on screen, especially in terms of the representation of women. It was also a moment of historical change. The cinema of the great Hollywood directors that the Cahiers loved, and learnt from, had come to an end and the cinema itself was changing. During the 1960s, we had been following [Jean-Luc] Godard, of course, and New Wave movies.  We, Peter and I and other British cinephiles, were already politically on the left and new cinemas that reflected our political commitments began to be distributed and exhibited in the UK.  

David Roche: Were you already considering making movies with Peter Wollen, or did this come later?

Laura Mulvey: No, not at all. Obviously, we couldn’t imagine making movies like the ones we ‘collected’ as cinephiles – movies made by all the great Hollywood directors.  Although Hollywood was Anglophone, it was culturally very foreign to us: industrially produced and driven by very American genres – Westerns, gangsters, for instance.  Perhaps this cultural strangeness might have contributed to its fascination.    

But the different cinemas, and new political cinemas, that began to arrive in the 1970s, gradually made it possible to think beyond writing about cinema theoretically and critically. New horizons opened up that made it possible to imagine making films theoretically and critically.

David Roche: So both the theoretical and the creative projects were parallel and started at the same time?

Laura Mulvey: No, definitely the writing came first. To put it more precisely: in the early 1970s, I (not having ever really bothered to write anything) began to write for the first time. It was feminist critical and political ideas that made this possible – literally a ‘liberation’ from years of writer’s block!  For Peter, Godard’s influence and his ‘cinema of ideas’ was particularly important. For instance, in his 1972 essay ‘Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent d’est’ (Vent d’est: Godard, Gorin and Martin, 1970), Peter evolved a negative aesthetic for cinema, which, later, became a sort of a blueprint for our early films. My equivalent ‘theoretical manifesto’ was my 1975 “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” essay. 

We made our first film, Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons, in 1974 when Peter was working at Northwestern University in the Department of Radio, Film and Television.  Peter had worked for the Head of Department, Paddy Whannel, at the BFI and we had always shared a great love of Hollywood. Although Paddy was a bit taken aback by Peter’s new interest in avant-garde film, he was always generous and imaginative.  He challenged us, saying ‘Peter, if you and Laura are now so interested in this avant-garde cinema, why don’t you make a film? We have good 16mm equipment here in the Film Department – available when the students are on vacation’. So that was how our first film came into being.    

But most important were the changes in UK film culture. Before we left in 1972, there was an incipient alternative film movement. But when we arrived back in London in 1974, these beginnings had gathered momentum with excitement about experimental film leading to new distributors bringing films from, for instance, Brazil’s Cine Novo, Straub-Huillet, new American avant-gardes. Programmers were putting on seasons and retrospectives.

Cristelle Maury: Could you tell us about your experience with the industry as an artist, an academic and a woman? How difficult was it to direct a film like Riddles of the Sphinx in the 1970s?

Laura Mulvey: I wasn’t an academic then.

Cristelle Maury: When did your academic career begin?

Laura Mulvey: Gradually, a little bit of teaching came my way, but I didn’t have an academic job until 1979-1980.

Cristelle Maury: So you made Riddles of the Sphinx as an artist first and foremost.

Laura Mulvey: I wouldn’t have thought of myself as an artist. The milieu in London, or UK, around the experimental film movement had very few academic connections, although the art schools were important. For instance, there was a kind of spectrum of film experimental activities. On one end, there was the London Filmmakers Co-op, and the people who made films there were artist film-makers. Since art schools had begun to incorporate film in the curriculum of art practice study in the late 1960s, many of them worked in art schools. We felt that we belonged to the same experimental film movement but we weren’t artists; we were much more theoreticians. The new cinemas we were seeing had made it possible to envisage films that reflected our theoretical interests and commitments . . . this was something new, not really connected to either milieux of artists or academics.

In terms of Peter’s and my everyday life: we had a small child – actually he was only smallish by then, he was born in 1969 and would have been around six-seven. I worked in a bookshop. After Northwestern University, his first academic job, Peter came back to an academic job at University of Essex.

Cristelle Maury: So would you say there is an autobiographical dimension in Riddles of the Sphinx?

Laura Mulvey: Not so much. The core theoretical issue at stake in Riddles of the Sphinx revolved around the mother and daughter’s relationship to the Oedipus trajectory and the Oedipus complex. So the ideas emerged from feminist psychoanalytic theory, from my Women’s Liberation reading group where we read Freud with great interest but always from a feminist perspective. I became close friends with the artist Mary Kelly. She, at the same time, was working on a very large project called Post-partum Document [1973-1979] about her relationship with her son, from birth and through the Oedipal trajectory. It was shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1976, so more or less at the same time as Mary made a ‘guest appearance’ in Riddles of the Sphinx reading from Post-partum Document. From our feminist perspective, the question of motherhood had never been adequately addressed psychoanalytically. Let me put it like this: Freud was extremely helpful to us in critiquing patriarchy. For instance, in my ‘Visual Pleasure’ essay, I could use his concepts, voyeurism, fetishism etc. to critique the culture of patriarchy. But psychoanalysis necessarily had its blind spots, especially where women were concerned, empty areas in certain important psychic points . . . like the question of motherhood in which Freud was either less interested or felt less able to pronounce and theorize about. The mother-child relationship had been fossilized as an image, an iconographical symbol, forever in art and culture of all kinds, and epitomized by the Virgin and Child – representing, as we saw it from a psychoanalytic perspective, the Lacanian Imaginary. We were influenced, for instance, by the kinds of questions Julia Kristeva was asking of psychoanalysis: how could women reconfigure the patriarchal Oedipus complex and the concept of the Lacanian Symbolic? So this is a long answer to say that the autobiographical aspect of Riddles of the Sphinx came more out of my deep involvement with feminism and feminist debates of the time – rather than my own family life!

David Roche: You just mentioned Lacan and Kristeva. Was Luce Irigaray also an influence at that time?

Laura Mulvey: Yes, I would say she was. But I think Kristeva’s idea of the ‘chora’ was central to us, her concept of poetic language – always on the verge of meaning but not quite under the Law of the Symbolic and the Order of the Father.

Cristelle Maury: How difficult was it to direct Riddles of the Sphinx and your later films? Are there opportunities and funding you may or may not have? You said you had a grant for Riddles of the Sphinx, was it the same for the next films? Could you tell us about instances of discrimination you have encountered or witnessed as a woman in the milieu?

Laura Mulvey: We were very protected. We were working in the cultural sphere, not in the industrial sphere. An institution like the BFI could go through different kinds of phases, just as you were describing before we began the interview – you were able to get your grant a year ago, but . . . might you get a grant today? That’s not so sure. Institutions are not immune to political upheavals.   

The 1970s, under a Labour government, was a time when the arts were taken seriously. For experimental film, the BFI was the main source of funding not just for us, but other very varied kinds of experimental, political and avant-garde filmmakers. The BFI funded the London Women’s Film Group and the first Black British film, Horace Ove’s Pressure. It was an unusual moment when institutions kind of fell into place, making various progressive initiatives possible. For instance, the journal Screen was funded by the BFI. Also very important in our environment was the Edinburgh Film Festival which showed our films and other films – experimental, radical films – from the UK and around the world. Edinburgh was an important environment for film theory as well as exhibition, holding themed seminars in collaboration with Screen across the mid-1970s. So it was a good moment.

Cristelle Maury: These films are framed explicitly as collaborations with Peter Wollen and Mark Lewis.

Laura Mulvey: I should add that this ‘very good moment’ that I’m describing took us all the way to Crystal Gazing in 1981. But the change of government in 1979 had brought the Conservative Party to power in the UK. Suddenly, we had Margaret Thatcher, and very very quickly, the atmosphere changed – just as you were describing your experience a moment ago.

Cristelle Maury: Do you feel you were on equal footing with Wollen and Lewis? What was your role in the production, in the writing and directing of the film? How did you work with your collaborators?

Laury Mulvey: It was very important for Peter and me, in our collaborations, to organize and agree as much as we could in advance of actual production. Our collaboration started with very early ideas for the films. Working with Oliver Fuke on an edition of Mulvey-Wollen’s scripts published in 2023,^[1] I realized that we did very little formal scripting for our early films. So our collaboration emerged first of all out of the ideas that were of political importance to us both (feminism, psychoanalytic theory, language etc) and then specific cinematic strategies, those of counter cinema, for instance. But in terms of direction, on the set, we knew in advance what we wanted. There was no discussion and no improvising.   

However, when it came to text, Peter was the writer; he had been writing poetry and stories since he was a teenager. I didn’t think of myself as a writer. At this time, Peter was very interested, alongside experimental film, in experimental writing, for instance in Raymond Roussel and surrealist writing strategies, which he used in Riddles of the Sphinx. So, in a sense, Peter and I collaborated as directors but he was also a collaborator as a writer – just as, for instance, in Riddles of the Sphinx, Mike Ratledge, composed the music, Peter in a similar way wrote the words. That was not a problem for me in the slightest. 

Cristelle Maury: Were there any women in the crew?

Laura Mulvey: Our cinematographer was Diane Tammes, one of the very first women to have union (Association of Cinema and Television Technicians) recognition in the UK.  It was incredibly important for us, more or less essential, in fact, that Riddles would be shot by a woman. Diane was an amazing technician and an extremely thoughtful camera woman. For example, when Peter and I decided to shoot the central section of Riddles of the Sphinx in a series of 360-degree pans, we hadn’t really considered the difficulty of it – the demands on the cinematographer. But Diane [Tammes] took it on; she figured out all how to solve the very difficult technical and practical problems . . .  and then managed the actual filming with an extraordinary level of imagination, skill, determination and actual physical –

David Roche: – prowess.

Laura Mulvey: Prowess, yes, exactly. A platform was built around the tripod so that she could, very slowly shifting her feet, move step by step, while rotating the camera head in a full circle. It was very very difficult. It’s also worth pointing out that the 360 degree pans were a challenge to our sound recordist, Larry Sider, (a great friend from the days ofPenthsilea: Queen of the Amazons at Northwestern): if you are trying to record synchronized sound and the camera is moving around in a circle, where do you go as a sound recordist? He had to find somewhere he could hold up his mic without casting a shadow or being in the way. It was technically extremely demanding. Because of all these on the set demands, Peter and I felt that it was really essential that we had everything we wanted worked out in advance. It was absolutely essential that we didn’t start disagreeing. We had to speak with a single voice when we came to the filming. I think we more or less achieved that by very very careful planning.  

David Roche: Did you also have women in the crew on the other films?

Laura Mulvey: Yes, we worked with Diane on all our films, except the one in the US. But after Riddles of the Sphinx, she worked on all the other Mulvey-Wollen films. And she always had women in her crew.

Cristelle Maury: Some of your documentaries are devoted to artists (Frida Kahlo) or art (Disgraced Monuments [Mark Lewis and Laura Mulvey, 1994]), others to academics (23^rd August 2008 [Mark Lewis and Laura Mulvey, 2013]). The Bad Sister [Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 1983] stages a TV producer speaking about the investigation in a studio, and your early avant-garde work (Riddles of the Sphinx, Crystal Gazing) also features academics having theoretical discussions, including yourself in Riddles! This seems to be a theme in your work. How do you negotiate your roles as an academic and a filmmaker?

Laura Mulvey: In Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons [Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 1974], it’s Peter who does the presentation, with an academic, essayistic pensée on the concept of the Amazons and [Heinrich von] Kleist’s version of Penthesilea. It might seem to be a rambling association of ideas but, in fact, it’s a very carefully constructed lecture. The camera follows him as he walks around a large conservatory type of room. But as he leaves his cue cards around and about the space, the camera wanders off to look at them. So, as the written word begins to emerge alongside the spoken word, the rather academic presentation is also ‘defamiliarised’ or distanced.  

Cristelle Maury: I think you’ve already more or less answered this question regarding your role as an academic and a filmmaker. Very concretely, how do you proceed? Do you write the theory and then make the film?

Laura Mulvey: In terms of the theory, Peter and I both had an interest in psychoanalysis and feminism as I mentioned before. Peter already knew Kristeva’s work because he was interested in linguistics – he worked in the Linguistics Department at Essex University. But in terms of our involvement in the actual process of filmmaking, we were both influenced by the legacy of avant-garde film – in filmic materiality and how the question of process or procedure is made visible. For instance, in Riddles of the Sphinx, the materiality of film itself is very much to the fore in the Sphinx refilmed sequence (Stones) which balances with the Acrobats sequence, where the film material was manipulated and colorized. So both those sequences are about materialities, with influences and ideas coming from the artist film-wing of the experimental movement. 

Laura Mulvey: I didn’t become an academic until the 1980s. As I said, I came out of an intellectual family milieu but that was very different from academia – particularly in those days. The academic film world in the UK in the mid-1970s was just taking off and there was also a growing interest in feminism in academic circles. So I suddenly found that I might potentially have an academic profile – in spite of my poor BA and, of course, no Ph.D. A few years after my ‘Visual Pleasure’ essay was published and Peter’s and my films were beginning to be known, I started to get academic jobs. But I didn’t identify very much with academia as such. 

David Roche: That’s interesting because you mentioned how you were collectively influenced by Godard and his turn in the early 1970s, which was a turn away from mainstream cinema toward a cinema that would engage with the post-1968 French climate, questions of colonization and feminism and what not. So does this mean that in the early 1970s it still felt like his work was very abstract, or was it just that French problems were French problems, far away on the other side of the Channel and Great Britain was ‘safe’ so to speak in the 1970s?

Laura Mulvey: You mean in the early 1970s? Peter felt that Godard’s late 1960s work made it possible to imagine a cinema of ideas – a cinema that could move into the essaystic. I think that nowadays our early films would probably be described as essay films.

Cristelle Maury and David Roche: We were going to ask you that question! [laughs]

Laura Mulvey: We thought about them more as theory films. Godard, for Peter, was a liberating influence, proving that a cinema of ideas was possible. And because the climate in the UK was favorable to experimental essaystic filmmaking, we were then able to take advantage of that. So . . . I’m trying to draw a picture in which new ideas were coming from France, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet were an important influence, and their films were just arriving through new distribution channels. Also, the New American Cinema – Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton – was also very influential. And definitely also Cinema Novo from Brazil. All these rather different radical cinemas were written about (for instance, in Afterimage) and screened at festivals, the National Film Theatre, art cinemas. So quite new ways of thinking about film were emerging quite suddenly in the late 1960s and early 1970s. We were fortunate that the climate in the UK made it possible for us to shift from writing about films theoretically to making films theoretically.

Cristelle Maury: There is a very strong political content in your films that goes beyond feminist politics. Do you consider it is your role as an intellectual to take a stand on political issues? We felt 23 August 2008, for example, represents a very poignant plea to that effect.

Laura Mulvey: Yes. And those kinds of political issues around questions of peace, the Third World and anti-colonial struggles take me back into my childhood – or rather teenage years. Politically, I was very influenced by my mother. During the Suez crisis of October 1956 (when I was 16) my mother took my sister and me on anti-government demonstrations. That was when my political awareness began. My mother was also a founding member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament – my sister and I joined the Aldermarston marches over several Easters in the late 1950s. So as a teenager in the 1950s, I became politically engaged. But my political engagement in the 1970s was more directed towards radical culture and the Women’s Movement.     

But with the invasion of Iraq in 2003, it was impossible not to feel all the resonances of the anticolonial demonstrations I had been to in the 1950s – demonstrating against British colonialism and the remnants of British colonialism all around the world. And, then, opposition to the American Vietnam war had been central to late 1960s politics. Subsequent to that, the assassination of my friend Faysal Abdullah’s younger brother Kamel in 2008 was a very poignant, tragic political moment. By 2014, I had wanted for quite some time to find a way to tell Kamel’s story and the lost, forgotten story of the Iraqi left.    

Although that film was primarily my project, Mark was very helpful in its production. I’d visualized doing the interview with Faysal more informally but Mark said, ‘Laura, if you’re going to do this, you must do this properly. I’ll bring my camera, and a cameraman and a proper sound recordist.’ In a sense, the collaboration on 23rd August 2008 was like that: it was my project with Faysal, that is, it was about him and about Kamel’s story. But Mark was more than just wonderful technical support because he has an extraordinary eye. He is definitely an artist. So the way he framed the image was absolutely crucial to the film, but the idea of the film was mine.

David Roche: So was it his idea to do it as a sequence-shot where the interviewee is the only voice?

Laura Mulvey: Yes. He was very determined that the unbroken ‘chunk’ of time was aesthetically, and in every way appropriate, for the project. He was right. The elongated shot allows Faysal’s voice the time and space to assert itself, as it were, just as a storyteller occupies a continuous sequence of time.  Mark and I did have a little bit of a difference of opinion about the opening shot in Baghdad. He really didn’t want that; he just wanted the absolute purity of the single shot.

Cristelle Maury: Why did you want this opening shot?

Laura Mulvey: [laughs] I just did. I wanted to create the sense of a kind of journey into Faysal, his presence, his stories. I didn’t want it to be too abrupt. And the camera moves through a very particular street – it’s Baghdad’s famous street of book-stalls and bookshops – where Kamel had been to buy a book just before he was assasinated. It seemed to me to bring a fleeting glimpse of Baghdad and Kamel’s immediate environment into the picture – kind of indexically. Anyway, Mark didn’t like it at all.

David Roche: That’s pretty interesting in terms of collaboration. I have a brief question about Disgraced Monuments. Considering you started studying History, it’s interesting that the film is both about art and history. And though it focuses on the USSR, watching it today, Disgraced Monuments seems to speak of the revisionism of history in the West as well. What is your take on the removal of Confederate statues in the US for instance?

Laura Mulvey: Yes, we have both been following the removal of Confederate statues with great interest; these events actually reignited our old interest in the topic. But that’s another story. 

Unlike 23 August 2008, Disgraced Monuments was definitely Mark’s project. Let me just go back a little bit. Mark is Canadian, although he’s lived most of his life in London. But in the late 1980s, he was living in Toronto and involved with a project called Public, an artists’ collective working to get art into public space. So when the USSR monuments began to come down, Mark became fascinated with the history of these démontages, the public removal of public monuments at times of political upheaval. He did a lot of research, going right back to the discussions around the French revolution. Perhaps, paradoxically, it was the Abbé Grégoire who first came up with the idea of conservation: he argued that monuments built to celebrate the monarchy and the church could become the heritage of the people, the French nation, and should be preserved in museums for future French citizens. It was a very important shift in the understanding of cultural history and politics and how the meaning of the past could be changed for a new era.

Mark visited London at some point in the late 1980s and told me about all this and I said, ‘It could be a documentary.’ He had only thought of it as an artist’s project. He loved the idea. There was no funding left for anything in the UK (this was in the aftermath of Thatcherism as I mentioned earlier), but in Canada there was state money and artists’ grants available. So Mark got money from Canada. When the Dzerzhinsky statue came down in August 1991, he said, ‘We have to go and film this now.’ So Disgraced Monuments was very much Mark’s project, that is, the ideas, the interviews, his eye for framing and camera positioning. But he had no experience of filmmaking at that point – I had more experience. My input was primarily to do with structure. I’m a bit obsessive about pattern and order. So it was quite a successful collaboration.

David Roche: Until ten years later when he was adamant that you had to be very rigorous about the sequence-shot. [laughs]

Laura Mulvey: Ah, yes. But that’s the kind of thing he would always have liked.

David Roche: One of the questions we ask everyone is, What does feminism mean for you? What is your relationship to feminism as a person and an artist? Our question more specifically would be, Do you feel your feminism has evolved since the 1970s and if so, how?

Laura Mulvey: If I return to the early days of feminism, to the 1970s, it’s clear that there were three main strands of cultural activism. To put it simply: attack, recuperation and innovation. Looking back, I can translate these strands into my own political priorities. For instance, the critique of patriarchy – e.g., the use of psychoanalysis and the concept of fetishism to critique, say, Hollywood cinema – which lead to my 1975 essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrativve Cinema’. Recuperation involves archival research – bringing the lost work of women writers, artists, filmmakers, the hidden from history, back into visibility. For the 1972 Edinburgh Festival ‘Women and Film’ event, I researched and found films directed by women, that might now be thought of as ‘classics’ but hadn’t then been seen for years. The Frida Kahlo & Tina Modotti [Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 1983] project was along those lines. Because, you have to remember, although Frida Kahlo is very well known now, in the early 1980s, she was forgotten. The third strand involves evolving a feminist aesthetic: women giving voice to their own stories, new ideas, women’s ways of experiencing, viewing and understanding the world.  That is, stories that only women could tell – unthinkable and unallowed under patriarchy. So for me, my filmmaking with Peter belonged to this strand. Riddles of the Sphinx includes practical, everday questions about childcare, women’s work, and so on, which, to my mind, belongs very much to this strand.

I also feel quite strongly that feminism has to battle on two fronts: one it has to battle for equality, or to make women’s voices and concerns effective in society and in the political sphere; but also, I think that men, everone, should be liberated from the oppressions and repressions of patriarchy that are so obscured by male power and dominance.  The voices of the unheard necessarly contribute to this – not only women but all marginalized people. Women, 50% of the population, traditionally, hardly made an impact on that culture and that politics. Not only did women suffer but society as a whole was also deprived of so much cultureal richness and innovation. As I just said, the same argument can be extended very easily to other oppressed groups – in terms, for instance, of class, race and gender.      

David Roche: That was what I had in mind when asking this question. Clearly, you described the fact that you came from a background where class issues were important, and you mentioned also at one point that the first black British movie [Pressure, Horace Ove, 1975] had been made around that time, but from our perspective as academics interested in questions of feminism, the discourse you’re having right now sounds intersectional. Is this something that has evolved at all or become more conscious in your thinking, or do you think it was already there in the 70s and has been clarified since, or not? Or has it just always been there? 

Laura Mulvey: I suppose it goes back to the last point I was making: that feminism has to, ultimately, include class and race in its politics and more and more so as women’s political aspirations, consciousness and confidence increase and as women achieve a more significant and ‘heard’ voice in society. Of course, there’s still a struggle to get voices heard and women, particularly mothers, are disadvantaged as soon as a society falls into social and economic crisis. But at the same time if I think for instance of the difference between women’s engagement in public life now and even in the 1960s and the 1970s, there’s a huge difference. Look, for instance, at the advances women have made in Hollywod and the consciousness-raising achieved by the #MeToo movement.  France pioneered bringing women into the film industry. If there is a film industry, obviously women should play as much of a part in it as men. Women in 2024 are infinitely more visible and infinitely more effective than in 1974. Not necessarily always for the good . . . from Margaret Thatcher to Giorgia Meloni, some women’s voices are not always as progressive as one might like . . . in British politics at the moment, there are some women in the Conservative Party who are nearly equal to fascists . . .

David Roche: We have that in France, too. It’s very obvious from your writings and also from our discussion today that aesthetics is very important for you in your theorizing, just as much as politics. So how do you feel about the simplified understanding of the male gaze that is now circulating in popular media, and that tends to make it a question of the director’s and the protagonist’s gender exclusively?

Laura Mulvey: Well you can probably imagine what I think of it!

David Roche: We’d like to hear you say it!

Laura Mulvey: (laughs) I do find that the idea has become a bit simplistic and ‘sloganistic’. However, that might in itself be of interest. It’s important that young people, young women and young men, want to think about spectatorship and want to think about gender and representation in the cinema. But several considerations in my original essay get lost nowadays. First of all, I was analyzing a particular cinema, Hollywood, which was essentially a star driven cinema, in which masculinity and femininity were both ‘sites of attraction’. However, because of massive ideological anxiety about the male star being an object of either the male or the female gaze, the male star was, by and large, protected from becoming the object of visual pleasure. His potential subordination to the ‘gaze’ found compensation in action and in driving the narrative forward. To my mind, it was the language of Hollywood film and its conventions of storytelling that secured masculinity and femininity in their ‘correct’ places. Thus, and it’s probably here where it gets a bit too complicated for the ‘male gaze’, film language and narrative identification locked all spectators, whether male or female, into a certain ‘visual pleasure’. For me, that is, this was about cinematic spectatorship… not a man whistling at a woman who was walking past in the street. 

David Roche: It’s a very interesting experience for us teaching in France because our students even when they speak French use the term, and for them it’s very easy to define. They say, ‘Oh that movie was horrible, it was full of male gaze.’

Laura Mulvey: (laugh) I quite like that.

David Roche: It’s interesting as teachers because, ten or fifteen years ago, we were bringing the concept to them, and they didn’t know it, and now they bring it to us, and we have to rediscuss it. It’s an interesting experience. We have two questions still linked to the male gaze. It was very interesting rewatching Riddles of the Sphinx which is often cited by other feminist film theorists as your exploration of the invitation to do away with the ‘male gaze’, to note that it refers to patriarchy but not to the ‘male gaze’. How deliberate was this? Would it be imaginable not to mention the ‘male gaze’ today now that it has become a mainstay of theory and even popular culture?

Laura Mulvey: I do take your point. You are right: the film’s content and polemic could be understood as a critique of patriarchy. But we were trying to open up a space for an imagination and a discourse that male artists, however brilliant, would not necessarily have found interesting or worthwhile. The actual strategy of filming, again for instance the 360-degree pans, should be understood both as ‘counter cinema’, a critique of existing conventions, but also a tentative opening up of new ways of cinematic seeing, which might, hopefully, be quite exciting in their own right. But we were also still interested in the elongagted ‘chunk’ of film that we had explored in our first film (Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons) that involved an ‘anti-editing’ polemic – once again a critique of identification, diplacing the exchange of looks and, indeed, the ‘male gaze’ that conventional cinema had been based on. But the pans were also an exploration of unexpected ways of cinematic seeing. To go back to my points much earlier in our conversation: both a critique of patriarchal convention but also an articulation of an alternative voice.

So the 360-degree pans in Riddles eliminated the need to edit, on the one hand. But on the other, the circular movement gave the camera apparatus a kind of autonomy: when it completed its circle, it finished the shot, without a director saying ‘cut’.   

David Roche: I have a follow-up question. Was the ‘crystal gaze’ of Crystal Gazing your answer to the male gaze?

Laura Mulvey: (laughs) No, I never thought of that before. You have to remember Crystal Gazing was made at a time when everybody – on the left, that is – was really depressed. The 1980s were a depressing time; the transition from the 70s to the 80s reminded us of the transition from the 20s to the 30s. Just as all the films we ever made were based on a pre-existing story, Crystal Gazing was based on a novel, Fabian, written in Berlin in 1930 by Erich Kästner. We based our four characters and their trajectories on the four protagonists of the novel.  But the theme of gazing into the future was not in the novel – this came from Peter and me. Its origin lay in our interest in the futures markets, and capitalist speculation on commodities, represented in Crystal Gazing through the character Vermilion. We also introduced science fiction. But it was also about confusing temporalities at a very difficult historical moment.

David Roche: it’s interesting because the movie came out before Gilles Deleuze wrote on the crystal image and it’s a movie that could exemply it.  

Laura Mulvey: I need to think about that. My interest in the crystal image has always been through Max Ophüls. Deleuze writes beautifully about Ophüls, about the crystal image in his movies. But I never thought of applying it to myself. That’s a wonderful idea, thank you. 

Cristelle Maury: To go on with the reflection on how you applied the political agenda of visual pleasure to your avant-garde films, I have several questions. In Crystal Gazing, for example, the narration is often fragmented, the voice-over taking over the images. How do the spectacles we are shown (for instance, the artists performing in Crystal Gazing) differ from the spectacles offered by classical Hollywood? You’ve already mentioned editing, but what are the other strategies to dismantle the male gaze? 

Laura Mulvey: This might not seem so relevant to the ‘male gaze’ question, but our films were always organized around a very obvious pattern, and symmetrical structure, balance, rhythm. It’s much more visible, of course, in the earlier films but those aesthetic principles are still crucial for Crystal Gazing. But I’m not quite sure I followed what you meant. 

Cristelle Maury: To what extent does Crystal Gazing qualify as counter-cinema? 

Laura Mulvey: Times had changed by the early 1980s. Each one of our films is very marked by the moment in which it was made. Penthesilea we thought of, following Godard, as ‘return to zero’, a return to scratch and to begin again from ‘scorched earth’ we called it. Penthesilea could be thought of as counter-cinema film. In Riddles of the Sphinx, we wanted to move on, to try to engage with and invent feminist cinematic strategies, moving beyond counter cinema in form and content, searching for an alternative voice.

The institutional context of Crystal Gazing is relevant. Thatcherism had a very immediate effect on grant giving institutions. But in 1982, the fourth British television channel came on air: Channel 4. Its guiding principles had been formed during the 1970s, during its slow evolution, and had preserved space for experimental film and alternative voices.Crystal Gazing was primarily a British Film Institute production, but, as it also had money from Channel 4, it was a much more elaborate production than our previous films. However, we still maintained a kind of rigour in its shooting strategy: each scene is a tableau, with continuous duration and shot from a single camera position. The film has a kind of theatricality to it – a sense of the camera looking through a frame of some kind into spaces. There was a concept of the gaze, but it was more tableau-istic gaze and in that sense influenced by Brecht. 

Cristelle Maury: What about The Bad Sister? It could almost be considered a genre film (it is described as a fantasy thriller and is an adaptation of a Gothic tale), but then it also uses the conventions of the TV mock documentary and interview. What do you think of this blending and blurring of genres? Was it deliberate on your part? Was it part of the counter-cinematic approach? 

Laura Mulvey: Yes. It comes from a novel which had a very Gothic feel to it. I’m never sure what I think of The Bad Sister. It was a Channel 4 production, with a very big (by our standards) budget and a formal, conventional crew.  We wanted to shoot on video as appropriate for a film made for television. The original idea was conceived around special effects, with distortions of reality and visual tricks, translating the Gothic spirit of the novel into the film/video medium. That turned out very much, much more difficult to do than we visualized. Nowadays, I think with digital it would be as easy as anything. In those days, of early electronic media, it was much harder. 

Cristelle Maury: The film opens in an editing suite. Why did you decide to have this TV producer introduce the topic in the opening scene? Why did you decide to have this effet de reel, almost self-reflexive opening?

Laura Mulvey: It was a self-reflexive opening. Emma Tennant , who wrote the novel, was a close friend of ours – Peter had worked with her on Bananas, the magazine that she edited. She adapted The Bad Sister from a Gothic Scottish novel of the 19^th century. Very often in that period novelists used an epistolary form, an exchange of letters – the transparency of the novel had not yet been established and the material presence of writing was foregrounded. We wanted to exaggerate and reframe the epistolary form transferring its self-reflexively into the editing room, which also presented all the characters rather like dramatis personae. 

David Roche: We have a question associating aesthetics with politics. “Visual Pleasure” famously emphasized imagery as the title suggests, and yet one of the things that is very striking when we watch all your movies back to back is how essential the soundtrack is. It plays a fundamental role in both your avant-garde films but also in your more recent documentaries: the science fiction-like music of Riddles of the Sphinx, but also the use of voice-over which is very frequent in your works; or when we talked about the sequence shot in 23^rd August the fact that the soundtrack exclusively relies on the interviewee’s voice, which is also very powerful. This is obviously interesting for us today because some of the feminist theorists who followed “Visual Pleasure” did focus on sound and the soundtrack, and voice, Kaja Silverman for instance. So did you see you and Peter Wollen and your other collaborators if the soundtrack is a means to undermine the image, or contradict the image in various ways?

Laura Mulvey: Perhaps it was not as simple as that. As I tried to write in the introduction to the book of scripts, Peter and I think about different relations to language. Language was of key importance to us, the place of language within psychoanalytic theory, the importance of language within the dominant symbolic order, and how the symbolic order can be undermined, Kristeva-like, with all kinds of alternative languages. So language was a political question for us in itself. Early on, for instance in Riddles of the sphinx, in the sequence I mentioned earlier where Peter was working with Raymond Roussel-type strategies, the idea was to have tried not to have found the language of the unconscious by any means but to find a language which emphasized the materiality of the word, and the materiality of the sentence. So this is just on the edge of meaning, which I think is probably the most successful example of Peter’s writing. So I think some of the bits of Crystal Gazing also work very well. But then at the same time, there’s also just the question of voice, quite apart from what the voice is saying. So the idea of the voice of the sphinx. Voice-over, voice is disembodied, disembodied speech. Something else that has to do with language. Perhaps this is something Peter and I were both, Peter perhaps more particularly because this was something he’d written about, was quotation, citation, bringing in the past through existing quotations. That was something again that came from Godard and his love for quotations, which I remember Peter talking about—and words in language coming also as quotations, as visual objects, as well as linguistic objects.  Peter always had a fondness for the way in which art incorporated word. So, there was a question of language, there was a question of voice, there was a question of word as image, a question of citation and quotation. So, all these ways, it almost all makes it sound as if we were not proper filmmakers, that we were kind of collagists of language, and in some ways I think that’s true. There was also a voice-over in Amy! [Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 1979], which is equivalent to the voice-over in Riddles which Peter actually constructed literally out of a montage quotations. It is about a ten-minute voice-over, and it’s just a montage, collage of heterogeneous bits of language. So all that work with language, meaning, questioning meaning, was very important to us on all these different levels. But I hope the image comes across too.

David Roche: Yes, of course, it’s just that you know, film scholars often tend to forget to think about sound and music.

Laura Mulvey: Yes, music was absolutely crucial as well. But to begin with, Peter and I felt that collaboration was an intrinsic element in our movies, with Diane (Tammes), the cinematographer, with the people who appeared as themselves, like Mary Kelly in Riddles and Yvonne Rainer delivering the voice-over in Amy! But in terms of music, we were also collaboraring with, say, the musician Mike Ratledge (Riddles). And then Lora Logic in Crystal Gazing. To my mind, Lora is much more herself than her fictional character, Kim, but, even more so, as she actually brought her music to our film she was, for us, more a collaborator than actor. And with strategies around sound, we worked always with our editor and sound designer, Larry Sider.

Cristelle Maury: What do you think of the work of contemporary women filmmakers who are fighting for equality in the film industry (in France the Collectif 50/50 for example). You’ve said a lot of things already about the #MeToo movement and how it has impacted the industry. But do you feel that contemporary women filmmakers have heeded your call to destroy traditional film conventions and create ‘a new language of desire’ as you claimed in ‘Visual Pleasure’?

Laura Mulvey: That’s too big a question (laughs). It’s a bit unfair for the last one.

Cristelle Maury (laughs): Just to wrap the interview up!

David Roche: We’ve got another easier one at the end.

Laura Mulvey: I’m afraid I’m so much out of circulation these days – there are so many new and recent films by women that I haven’t seen and would have liked to have seen, which does emphsise how many more there are now days. However, I would like to mention a couple of films that revolve around a mother-daughter relationship, that do, to my mind, approach a ‘new language of desire’ with stories, I think, that only women would care to tell. Petite Maman [2021] by Céline Sciamma is an extraordinary reimagination of a mother-daughter relationship.  And then Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir [2019] and The Souvenir: Part Two [2021] are fascinating, especially as depictions of mourning and melancholia. But the third film The Eternal Daughter, [2022] specifically reimagines a mother daughter relationship (Tilda Swinton plays both) with a radical, and to my mind, feminist, use of cinema to confuse time and create a space outside its usual linearity. There are echoes there, from the perspective of a reconfigured time and space, of Petite Maman and the two films make an interesting juxtaposition.  

David Roche: We have one last question. You yourself have become a mentor for many scholars including Cristelle and myself. And you have mentioned male mentors today since you did mention Godard, but we wanted to know if you had also women role models and if you feel this is important. It could be Frida Kahlo, or other artists, your mother . . .

Laura Mulvey: I don’t really think in terms of mentors . . . I only came across the term in this kind of informal use when I was at a US university in the 80s. I can’t quite see Godard as a ‘mentor’.  I only met him once . . . ‘Role model’ sounds more familiar but I can’t think of anyone I actually wanted to ‘model’ myself on.   

David Roche: You mentioned Kristeva.

Laura Mulvey: She would be one of a number of really important theoretical influences, but there was no personal connection between us. I can think of friends whom I admire – that seems to make sense. Yvonne Rainer, for instance! Yvonne wasn’t a role model but perhaps more significantly, an influential friend whose way of thinking about her work and her art I greatly admired and contributed, crucially, to new ways of thinking and imagining. And Mary Kelly, whom I mentioned earlier. I admire Mary not only as an artist but as a woman of extraordinary courage, who never deviated from her aesthetic and political convictions, never compromised – from the furore over Post Partum Document onwards. I should also mention Chantal Akerman, another woman whose uncompromising courage and commitment to her convictions I admire as in her masterpiece, Jeanne Dielman, but also herself . . .

In terms of my family, I admire my great grand-mother, who was an extremely significant poet and essayist in the late 19th and early 20^th centuries. While being quite austere in her writing, she definitely represents experiments with (what I can only call) a feminine perspective – in terms of the topics she chose to write about but also her highly visual, immediate, perception. Formative influences! Definitely my mother, Sylvia Mulvey, has been the most important influence on me. My love of literature, art, Italy . . . came from her, as well as her politics (which I mentioned above) . . . and so many other things that I can’t go into here. My god-father, Gervase Mathew (OP), certainly deepened my love of history and art and architecture. Going back to the role model idea: nowadays I could imagine my granddaughter, Zoe, as a role model. I really admire the way that she negotiates the challenges facing young women in these difficult days . . . with a great combination of charm and practicality!    

Cristelle Maury and David Roche: That’s perfect.  All right, well thank you so much again for your time.Laura Mulvey: Thank you for making it so painless – and actually enjoyable!  

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^[1] Fuke, Oliver, ed. The Films of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen: Scripts, Working Documents, Interpretation.  BFI/Bloomsbury, 2023.