IVAC 2019: Visual Pleasure and the Female Gaze

Visual Pleasure and the Female Gaze

curated by 

Christopher Zimmerman

presented at the 2019 edition of Images and Views of Alternative Cinema

Nicosia, Cyprus

Laura Mulvey & Peter Wollen Riddles of the Sphinx (1977)

Laura Mulvey’s 1975 groundbreaking essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ represents a turning point in feminist film theory whose resonances are still powerfully felt today.  Mulvey’s psychoanalytically-inflected theory of spectatorship locates film’s power and fascination in two independent drives:  scopophilia and identification.  The decisive innovation of Mulvey’s radicalized critique is her turn from content to form, thus arguing that all films of classical cinema are implicated in perpetuating the dominant phallocentric patriarchy. 

In 1977 with fellow film theorist Peter Wollen, Mulvey made the experimental feature-length essay film Riddles of the Sphinx, which put into practice the theoretical commitments of ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ in critiquing the male gaze thus opening the possibility of developing modes of creative production and of spectatorship that unfold outside of patriarchy—a ‘female gaze.’ 

Visual Pleasure and the Female Gaze weaves Mulvey’s landmark essay and film into a tapestry with contemporary films by four women experimental filmmakers who have responded to Mulvey’s call for a non-phallocentric mode of spectatorship with work that nurtures a ‘female gaze’ and generates new languages.

Program One—Monday, February 18, 2019

Laura Mulvey & Peter Wollen  Riddles of the Sphinx     1977    92:00

Program Two—Wednesday, February 20, 2019

Jodie Mack         Unsubscribe #2:  All Eyes on the Silver Screen 2010    2:45

Martha Colburn  What’s On                 1997    1:47

Laura Kraning    Language of Memory    2009    4:00

Jodie Mack         Blanket Statement #1:  Home is Where the Heart Is           2012           2:53

Martha Colburn  Western Wild…or How I Found Wanderlust & Met Old Shutterhand 2018    8:46

Jodie Mack         Wasteland #1:  Ardent Verdant   2017           4:30

Laura Kraning    Meridian Plain            2016    18:30

Melika Bass         Creature Companion    2018    30:00

Jodie Mack         Razzle Dazzle            2014    4:48

Film Synopses

Program One

Laura Mulvey & Peter Wollen Riddles of the Sphinx 1977        92:00

A hand flicks through a book full of different representations of the Sphinx.  Through direct address to the audience, intercut with images and text, the filmmaker, Laura Mulvey, examines the myth's cultural and historical significance.  She explains how the Sphinx will act as the film's narrator because it's voice is different from the authoritative voice associated with patriarchy, both in film and on the page. It is a "questioning voice, a voice asking a riddle."  This explanation is followed by abstracted images of the Sphinx at Gaza taken from tourist film and photographs.  This section, and much of the middle section, is overlaid with electronic compositions by Mike Ratledge.

Divided into 13 segments, the second section of the film switches from the filmmaker's direct address to a third person narration of the story of Louise, a young mother struggling to juggle work and childcare after separation from her husband.  Each segment is a 360 degree pan of the camera around a fixed location, describing different aspects of Louise's journey from housewife and mother to a woman with a sense of her own identity and empowerment.  One pan depicts her standing at the window with her child in her arms as her husband leaves.  She has her back to the camera and we do not yet see her face, for her identity is still associated intrinsically with her domestic environment and her passive role.

Laura Mulvey & Peter Wollen Riddles of the Sphinx (1977)

As Louise goes out to work, other worlds and other voices begin to interject into this interior world.  A slow pan around women at switchboards shows that their drudgery at home has been replaced by drudgery at work.  The women discuss approaching the unions about the difficulty of finding childcare while at work.  Louise's growing questions about her own situation as a single working mother and the wider patriarchy which oppresses her accompany the camera's pan around a melancholy, windswept park as she plays with her child.  Her questions are inconclusive, bringing her "out into society and back into her own memory," but she is now more able to articulate them.  The slow and constant rotation of the camera is accompanied by a fragmented voice-over which sometimes articulates Louise's thoughts, but also introduces other voices, of the women that she works with or her new friend Maxine.

As Louise's tale ends, a sequence depicts female acrobats who, like the Sphinx, are transformed by an experimental use of film processing.  While the sphinx was rendered grainy and indeciperable, the acrobats are solarised and tinted in an exuberant array of colours, signalling their liberation and energy.  The up-beat images of the acrobats are followed by one of Mulvey, who again takes up her position in direct address to the viewer, but here she is listening to her earlier explanation of the Sphinx and her film on a tape recorder and reflecting on it, sometimes making notes.  The final image of the film is a close-up of a pocket puzzle as a ball of mercury finds its way to the centre of the maze.  The invisible player shakes the puzzle and the image becomes a blur of silver.

—British Film Institute

Program Two

Jodie Mack Unsubscribe #2:  All Eyes on the Silver Screen (2010)

Jodie Mack 

Unsubscribe #2: All Eyes on the Silver Screen  2010  2:45

Everybody’s watching…

Martha Colburn 

What’s On  1997 1:47

Super 8mm color stop motion animated film with hand painting about the evils of television, set to the poetry of 99 Hooker and samples of Naval Cassidy.

Laura Kraning Language of Memory  2009 4:00

Language of Memory is a hand-processed, optically printed 16mm film composed of rayographs of my grandmother’s still negatives from the early 1900s, strips of her old lace casting abstract patterns on high contrast film, and the overlapping gestures of sewing and splicing film, related techniques historically attributed to women. It is both homage to my grandmother’s creative influence and a deconstruction of memory through fragmentation and the accretion of associations surfacing from the tactile processes of the film’s making.” — Laura Kraning

Jodie Mack Blanket Statement #1:  Home is Where the Heart Is 2012 2:53

Discordant dysfunction down to the nitty griddy.

Martha Colburn Western Wild…or How I Found Wanderlust & Met Old Shutterhand 2018 9:09

Western Wild…or how I found Wanderlust and met Old Shatterhand is a densely textured documentary about a film-maker making a film about the famed German author Karl May. The film weaves through a mixture of stop motion animation, found footage and interviews that itself is enough to generate sensory Wanderlust.

Jodie Mack Wasteland #1:  Ardent Verdant 2017 4:30

A eulogy for wasted potential sends the out of date to the out of body: trash to treasure. An appetite for destruction charts the product life cycle, interrupting the horizon through an intersection of perspectives.

Laura Kraning Meridian Plain 2016 18:30

Meridian Plain maps an enigmatic distant landscape excavated from hundreds of thousands of archival still

Laura Kraning Meridian Plain (2016)

images, forecasting visions of a possible future, transmitted from a mechanical eye.

“With her newest project, the dazzling Meridian Plain (2016), Kraning moves in a slightly different direction, still exploring landscape but this time working from an archive of mechanically captured still images that she laboriously organized and then worked with frame by frame, creating a magisterial portrait of a seemingly otherworldly landscape.  It is yet another black-and-white project, and we might consider it not time-lapse so much as space-lapse, wherein spaces collapse and give way to each other. Through her editing, Kraning produces complex visual and almost physical rhythms, moving from staccato pulses and a roiling horizon to hovering and shaking and ultimately disintegration.” 

— Holly Willis

Melika Bass Creature Companion 2018 30:00

“A beguiling, perhaps radical, reinterpretation of femininity in American suburban life.” – MUBI

Winner: Special Mention of the International Jury, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen

US Premiere: 10th BAMcinemaFest, New York

In the American suburbs, two women mysteriously and sensuously entwine in this slow-burning, saucy, abstracted fable on the longing and laboring female body.

Directed by Melika Bass. Featuring Selma Banich and Penelope Hearne.  Co-produced by Dave Tolchinsky and Dan Silverstein.

Jodie Mack Razzle Dazzle 2014 4:48

Tacky threads luminesce at a firefly's pace, twinkling through remnants of chintzy opulence and gaudy glamour prestissimo brilliante.

Filmmaker Biographies

Melika Bass

“American filmmaker Melika Bass…author of a unique cinema of atmosphere and historical reminiscences…one of the revelations of the Torino Film Festival.” 

                                                                                         (Roberto Manassero, Torino Film Festival)

Named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film 2018,” Bass is the recipient of an Artadia Award (NYC), 2  Media Arts Fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, the Kodak/Filmcraft Imaging Award from the Ann Arbor Film Festival, an Experimental Film Prize from the Athens International Film Festival, and a Special Mention Prize from the International Jury of the 2018 International Short Film Festival Oberhausen.

 

Melika Bass Creature Companion (2018)

Screenings and exhibitions include the BAMcinemaFest, Brooklyn; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (solo exhibition); Torino Film Festival, Italy; Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York; Kino der Kunst, Munich; Ann Arbor Film Festival; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; Anthology Film Archives, New York;  BFI London Film Festival; Athens International Film Festival; Segal Center for the Performing Arts, Montreal; International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany; and the Split Festival of New Film, Croatia. Her work has been profiled and reviewed in Filmmaker Magazine, Time Out Chicago, Bad at Sports, Art Daily, Rolling Stone Italy, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Reader, Pitchfork, and Criterion.

Martha Colburn

Born in rural Pennsylvania, Martha Colburn is an artist filmmaker based in Pennsylvania, USA and Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She travels extensively exhibiting and lecturing on her work. She has a B.A. from Maryland Institute College of Art and MA equivalent from Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunst in the Netherlands.

In the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, she was invited to initiate the ‘New Frontiers’ film and video installation program, with ‘Meet Me In Wichita” and in 2008 to opened the Museum of Art and Design (NY) with a live performance of films and music. In 2010 two of her films joined the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Martha Colburn Western Wild…or How I Found Wanderlust & Met Old Shutterhand (2018)

In 2013 her film ‘Metamorfoza’ was invited to participate in the series ‘Visual Arts’ by curator of the Collection de Bruin‐Heijn and performed by the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra. She is a 2015 recipient of the Creative Capital Award for film for the production of ‘Western Wild’. Recipient of the Mondriaan Foundations Working Artist Grant in 2016, she also did a number of performances including Amsterdam Art Week (with singer/ songwriter Rita Braga and Into the Great Wide Open Festival-with musician Jacco Gardner and cellist Helena Espvall. She also had a film retrospective screening in the Center for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona, Spain.

In 2017, her film ‘Metamorfoza’ was included in the B3 Biennale of the Moving Image in Frankfurt, Germany and participated in the Mondriaan Foundations’ Delta Workers Art Residency in New Orleans, LA, USA. Her films are included in a number of exhibitions and films premiering in Sundance Film Festival (a collaboration with the performance artist ‘Narcissister’ and she is included in the Rotterdam International Film Festival with a live performance with composer Jeroen Kimmans’ musical group ‘Orquesta del Tiempo Perdido’ and her newest film, created with a grant from the Creative Capital Foundation Award for film ‘Western Wild…or how I found Wanderlust and met Old Shatterhand’.

Laura Kraning

Laura Kraning’s moving image work navigates the spaces of landscape, memory, and the technological sublime. Her work has screened widely at international film festivals and venues, such as the New York Film Festival’s Views from the Avant-Garde and Projections, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Edinburgh International Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, Visions du Réel, Festival du Nouveau Cinema, MoMA Doc Fortnight, and REDCAT Theater, among others. She is a recipient of the Princess Grace Foundation John H. Johnson Film Award, the Leon Speakers Award and Jury Awards at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Film House Award for Visionary Filmmaking at the Athens International Film and Video Festival, and the Jury Award for Best Short Film at the Rencontres Internationales Sciences et Cinémas in Marseille.

Jodie Mack

Jodie Mack is an experimental animator who received her MFA in film, video, and new media from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007. Combining the formal techniques and structures of abstract/absolute animation with those of cinematic genres, her handmade films use collage to explore the relationship between graphic cinema and storytelling, the tension between form and meaning. Musical documentary or stroboscopic archive: her films study domestic and recycled materials to illuminate the elements shared between fine-art abstraction and mass-produced graphic design. The works unleash the kinetic energy of overlooked and wasted objects and question the role of decoration in daily life.

Mack's 16mm films have screened at a variety of venues including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Images Festival, Projections at the New York Film Festival, and the Viennale. She has presented solo programs at the 25FPS Festival, Anthology Film Archives, BFI London Film Festival, Harvard Film Archive, National Gallery of Art, REDCAT, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennale, and Wexner Center for the Arts among others. Her work has been featured in publications including Artforum, Cinema Scope, The New York Times, and Senses of Cinema. Named one of Filmmaker Magazine's 2014 "25 New Faces to Watch" and one of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' YBCA 100 in 2015, she is an Associate Professor of Animation at Dartmouth College. She is a 2017/18 Film Study Center Fellow and Roberta and David Logie Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Laura Mulvey

Laura Mulvey was born in Oxford on 15 August 1941.  After studying history at St. Hilda's, Oxford University, she came to prominence in the early 1970s as a film theorist, writing for periodicals such as Spare Rib and Seven Days.  Much of her early critical work investigated questions of spectatorial identification and its relationship to the male gaze, and her writings, particularly the 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, helped establish feminist film theory as a legitimate field of study.

Between 1974 and 1982, Mulvey co-wrote and co-directed with her husband, Peter Wollen, six projects:  theoretical films, dealing in the discourse of feminist theory, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and leftist politics.  The first of these, Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons (1974) explored concerns central to Mulvey's writings:  the position of women in relation to patriarchal myth, symbolic language and male fantasy.  Penthesilea represents an experimental British venture into territory pioneered by the likes of Jean-Luc Godard.  With its counter-cinema style and relentlessly didactic approach, however, its appeal was inevitably limited to a restricted audience.

The most influential of Mulvey and Wollen's collaborative films, Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), presented avant-garde film as a space in which female experience could be expressed.  Remarkable formalistic innovation, notably 360-degree pans, inform the film's content, describing the mother's loss of and search for identity.  The result is a challenging, forceful, and intelligent film.

AMY! (1980), a tribute to Amy Johnson, is a more accessible reworking of themes previously covered by Mulvey and Wollen, but it is ponderous and slow.  Far from a conventional biopic, the aviator is used as a symbolic figure, her journey exemplifying the transitions between female and male worlds required by women struggling towards achievement in the public sphere.

Crystal Gazing (1982) represented a departure from the emphatic formalism of Mulvey and Wollen's earlier films.  It demonstrated more spontaneity than previous works, both in performances and in the storyline, elements of which were left undecided until the moment of filming.  Bleak, but with playful touches, this representation of London during the Thatcher recession was generally well received, despite criticism of Mulvey for the lack of a feminist underpinning to the film.  She admitted she had been reluctant to incorporate feminist polemics fearing they would unbalance the film.

Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (1982) and The Bad Sister (1982) followed, revisiting feminist film issues. After these, Mulvey did not return to film-making until 1991 when production began on her solo project Disgraced Monuments, an examination of the fate of revolutionary monuments in the Soviet Union after the fall of communism.

Laura Mulvey is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London.

For more information about this program screened at Images and Views of Alternative Cinema (Nicosia, Cyprus), visit:

'Weaving, Layering, Dispersal:  from politics to theory to praxis--Laura Mulvey in conversation with Christopher Zimmerman'

Essay:  'From Confrontation to Creativity' by Christopher Zimmerman