IVAC 2019: From Confrontation to Creativity

Images and Views of Alternative Cinema 2019

From Confrontation to Creativity

by

Christopher Zimmerman

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

‘An important aspect of avant-garde aesthetics is negation:  a work is formed, or driven to find a position, by the very code of the dominant tradition that is being opposed.  These works have then to be read, and achieve meaning, in the reflected light of the aesthetics they negate.  One aspect of the problems implicit in formulating a new aesthetics from scratch is thus circumvented.’[1]

Laura Mulvey

Laura Mulvey’s 1975 groundbreaking essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ represents a turning point in feminist film theory.  Her psychoanalytically-inflected theory of spectatorship locates film’s power and fascination in two independent drives:  the pleasure of looking and identification.  The decisive innovation of Mulvey’s radicalized critique is her turn from content to form, thus arguing that all ‘classical’ narrative films 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[2], which put into practice the theoretical commitments of ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’.  Not only does this film, and their six collaborations in general, subvert the male gaze, but it develops modes of creative production and of spectatorship that unfold outside of the structures of patriarchy.  

There seems to be a tendency to celebrate ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ in isolation with its obligatory inclusion in ‘historicized’ film theory readers, for example.  However, when we re-read this essay within the fabric of Mulvey’s entire body of work, we can see that there is a much more extensive and inter-related system in operation.  Constantly navigating the tension between theory and practice, we can see Mulvey’s films as ‘positive’ responses to the ‘negative’ critique of her essays.  This is to say that Mulvey develops a praxis out of a dialectic in which her theoretical essays, rooted in particular political situations, and her essay films, performing or actualizing her theoretical insights, enter into a mutual, productive dynamism. 

And yet, Mulvey’s praxis is not simply a matter of translating theoretical critique into cinema, rather the negative critique of patriarchy, as the necessary first confrontational step, tills the soil out of which the possibility of generating new cinematic languages emerges.  In retrospect, Mulvey writes: ‘“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” was written in the polemical spirit that belongs properly to the early confrontational moments of a movement.  The great problem is then to see how to move to “something new”, from creative confrontation to creativity.’[3]  

This is to say that the negative critique not only confronts phallocentrism, but it contains the embryo of future creative possibilities.  In its very act of negation and confrontation, Mulvey’s critique represents a clearing, an opening, in which new ways of filmmaking and ways of viewing can be cultivated and nurtured.  A new language can be born only by first analyzing and critiquing the dominant language, the dominant culture, its oppression of women, and its ideological conception of masculine creativity.

In this essay, I would like to outline the main arguments of ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, thus establishing the negative critique, and then discuss the essay-film Riddles of the Sphinx in the context of a response to Mulvey’s call for new feminist film languages.  Through a discussion of works by Jodie Mack, Martha Colburn, Laura Kraning, and Melika Bass, we will pinpoint the various ways in which these feminist filmmakers  liberate ways of looking from masculine cinematic codes, thus opening the possibility of a ‘female gaze’, however contentious such a formulation may be…

Theory—The Essay

Prior to the innovations Mulvey makes in ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, the central concern of feminist film theory was focused on women’s roles in films.  The representation of women on screen was, by and large, framed theoretically within a rather conventional realism rooted in mimesis.  The ‘negative’ critique that Mulvey levels against the dominant phallocentric patriarchy shifts from one of representation to a critique of the mode of representation itself.  Mulvey’s essay turns from content to form and argues that all films of classical cinema are implicated in perpetuating the structures of patriarchy, in aligning spectatorship with the ‘male gaze’, and in  ‘elevating’ woman to spectacle to circumvent her threat of castration. 

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

Wielding psychoanalytic theory as ‘a political weapon,’[4] Mulvey formulates a theory of spectatorship that confronts and deconstructs the ‘male gaze’ and its framing of sexual difference.  In the opening paragraph of the essay, Mulvey writes that, ‘it takes as starting point the way film reflects, reveals and even plays on the straight, socially established interpretation of sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle.’  Already the sign is being separated from its referent, and the task of analysis is framed in terms of revealing the forces hidden underneath or behind the surfaces of images. 

Mulvey first distinguishes between three types of ‘looks’ in the cinematic experience (the look of the camera registering the action, the look of the spectator at the screen, and the looks of the characters at each other within the narrative), and argues that this hierarchy of looks is gender-coded:  the man looks, and the woman is looked at.  Mulvey then locates the power and fascination of cinema in two independent drives.  The first drive is what Freud referred to as ‘scopophilia’—the pleasure of looking—and Mulvey argues that this pleasure treats ‘other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze’.[5]  What structures this gaze are both the very set-up of the traditional cinema (its apparatus with hidden projector, spectator sitting in the dark, illuminated screen) and the ‘voyeurism’ of classical film and the continuity system, in which the camera’s presence and the constructed nature of moving images are hidden and unacknowledged.  This dominant mode of spectatorship positions the audience sitting in the dark, out of sight, looking into the lives of others.  We are all voyeurs when watching a film; we observe without being observed; our gaze is not returned.

The second source of pleasure is located in the drive to regress to an ‘originary’ moment of self-recognition theorized by Jacques Lacan in his ‘Mirror Stage’.[6]  Lacan pinpoints a mis-cognition (a mis-recognition) that proves decisive for the processes of identification and ego formation in early childhood development.  When an infant, in her mother’s arms, sees her reflection in the mirror for the first time, she realizes that she is distinct from her mother.  However, in order to realize this, the infant sees herself as possessing more developed motor abilities and independence than she actually has.  In this moment of mis-cognition, the infant idealizes itself (sees itself as more powerful than she is) and does so from a position outside of itself.  She identifies with herself as an image, as an ‘other’.

In cinematic terms, the male movie star is more powerful and perfect than we can possibly be and controls and drives the narrative.  The spectator projects his look onto his screen surrogate, identifying with the idealized male hero, thus allowing the viewer, like the infant in front of the mirror, to adopt a more complete and active sense of the self.  Within the fantasy of cinema, we can overcome our impotence through the potency of the male hero.   These two contradictory aspects of looking isolate both the pleasure from using another as an object of sexual stimulation (objectification of the woman on screen) and the narcissistic identification with the image of the male hero who represents a more potent doubling of the viewer.

Mulvey then makes the theoretical shift from content (representation) to form (mode of representation) by drawing out a distinction found in the heterosexual division of labor that controls both narrative structure and this dominant mode of spectatorship:  the passive woman who serves as a blank slate upon which the active gaze of the man projects his desire and fantasy.  Mulvey elaborates:

The image of woman as (passive) raw material for the (active) gaze of man takes the argument a step further into the structure of representation, adding a further layer demanded by the ideology of the patriarchal order as it is worked out in its favorite cinematic form—illusionistic narrative film.[7]

The passive woman is objectified by the active male gaze and shaped by his eroticized look, and the moments in film when she is displayed, the narrative comes to a halt.  Yet, at the same time, Mulvey’s use of psychoanalytic theory allows her to argue that woman’s exhibitionist function (to be displayed) poses a deeper problem:  she represents the threat of castration.  In fact, woman, as lacking a penis, functions as the lynchpin of the entire system and of the formation of the patriarchal unconscious.  This is the paradox of phallocentrism:  it is the woman’s lack that produces the symbolic power of the phallus.  Woman is displayed for the enjoyment of the male gaze, however she always also threatens to evoke castration anxiety and thus un-pleasure.  Woman threatens to delay or prevent the forward movement of the narrative that is controlled and mastered by the male hero.  Mulvey argues that the male unconscious, in order to circumvent this threat of castration, has two ways of escaping:  voyeurism or fetishization.   

 

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

Mulvey summarizes:  ‘Going far beyond highlighting a woman’s to-be-looked-at-ness, cinema builds the way she is to be looked at into the spectacle itself.  Playing on the tension between film as controlling the dimension of time (editing, narrative) and film as controlling the dimension of space (changes in distance, editing), cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire.  It is these cinematic codes and their relationship to formative external structures that must be broken down before mainstream film and the pleasure it provides can be challenged.’[8]

Politics-Theory-Praxis

Built into politics, into any political project, is a tension between the particular and the universal.  Political change emerges out of concrete social, economic, and cultural circumstances.  For a movement to emerge, the particular issues and claims made by particular individuals in particular circumstances must reach beyond to the universal in the form of appeals to humanistic values, for example.  Authentic change, therefore, can only be brought about by careful navigation of this tension, which requires a constant shuttling or oscillation between concrete particulars and universal themes of commonality and interconnectedness.

‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ was written within concrete political and social contexts in Britain in the early 1970s.  Mulvey’s involvement in the Women’s Movement opened her to the world of theory, and she began to apply the theoretical tools of psychoanalysis and semiotics to the Hollywood cinema that she so loved.  Her early writings emerge out of feminist politics (and not academia), in which woman’s body becomes political (issues around reproductive rights, childcare…) and, thus, so does its representation (objectification of woman’s body as spectacle).

In complete awareness of the tension between the particular and universal, between theory and practice, Mulvey insists that the negative critique of the essay is simply the first step in confrontational critique, but a necessary first step that opens the possibility of other modes of spectatorship and new cinematic languages to replace and fill the space cleared by deconstructing the male gaze.  The negative critique opens the possibility of positive production and creativity. 

In Mulvey’s body of work, both her theoretical essays and her films, there is a movement from politics to theory to practice.  When considered together, we can see that Mulvey’s films respond to the call for ‘positive’ production in the wake of the negative critique.  Her films, Riddles of the Sphinx in particular, perform and translate into practice the theoretical commitments articulated in the essay. 

Practice:  The Film

As Mulvey makes clear in her writings, it is not enough simply to stand in opposition to mainstream narrative film.  The films that Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen made collaboratively undermine all dynamics and expectations of the ‘male gaze’ and represent experiments in which image, text, voice, sound, music are woven into theoretically-engaged tapestries of ideas:  essay-films.

 

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

Emerging out the literary tradition of the essay, the essay-film’s discursive nature and heterogeneous modes of composition have opened fertile territory for both the kind of personal, self-reflexive cinema and of a cinema of ideas—film that thinks—crucial to feminist filmmaking.  Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s 1977 essay-film Riddles of the Sphinx weaves an intricately layered tapestry of ideas, strategies, and word-images that subverts, at every step, the expectations of conventional cinema and opens a space in which we, as viewers, can think with and through the questions posed by this film that presents itself as a riddle.  

Framed as a riddle and as a book that requires investigation and reading, Riddles of the Sphinx reaches back, just as Freud does with the Oedipus Complex, to ancient myth.  Mulvey explains that:

The film used the Sphinx as an emblem through which to hang a question mark over the Oedipus complex… Riddles of the Sphinx and Penthesilea, our previous film, used ancient Greece to invoke a mythic point of origin for Western civilization, that had been reiterated by high culture throughout our history.  Both the history of the Oedipus Complex and the history of antiquity suggest a movement form an earlier “maternal” stage to a later “paternal” or “patriarchal” order.[9]

By taking the figure and voice of the Greek sphinx (who is a woman, unlike the male Egyptian sphinx) as narrator (a voice-off), the film traces a feminist counter-history that has been repressed and excluded by the shift to patriarchy represented in the founding Oedipal myth.   

Dealing with the dilemmas of motherhood experienced within contemporary patriarchal society, Riddles of the Sphinx presents the story of Louise whose journey from the strictures of the home into the larger world of work and the social sphere represents her transformation of consciousness from silent repression to independence and on to political engagement. 

Mulvey explains: 

What recurs overall is a constant return to woman, not indeed as a visual image, but as a subject of inquiry, a content which cannot be considered within the aesthetic lines laid down by traditional cinematic practice.  Pleasure and involvement are not the result of identification, narrative tension or eroticized femininity, but arise from surprising and excessive use of the camera, unfamiliar framing of scenes and the human body, the demands made on the spectator to put together disparate elements.  The story, the visual themes and the ideas are not in coherent conjunction with one another, and ask to be read in terms of developing relations between feminism and experimental film and psychoanalysis.[10]

This constant return to woman and her subjectivity is expressed both in content as well as by film form.  The film’s formal web of interrelations, which defies all narrative conventions, presupposes a different kind of ideal spectator.  The film demands a different relationship, a more active, curious, and theoretically-grounded engagement with this intricately layered essay-film.

Just as Mulvey’s work navigates between theory and practice, the film’s content and form mutually reinforce each other.  What does this mean?  Let us turn to the opening of the film and its formal characteristics.  As a woman flips through a book with texts in French and images of woman depicted as mysterious and threatening underneath their erotic surfaces (culminating with an image of Greta Garbo’s face on the Egyptian sphinx), the film’s title is over-laid followed by Gertrude Stein’s words:  ‘A narrative of what wishes what it wishes to be.’  We have immediatley entered a literary world.  Just like a book, the film’s table of contents then appears:

1. Opening pages

2. Laura speaking

3. Stones

4. Louise’s story told in thirteen shots

5. Acrobats

6. Laura listening

7. Puzzle ending

Riddles of the Sphinx undermines the dramatic structure of the traditional narrative film, in which the story unfolds sequentially, by exploring two notions:  nesting and weaving.  These ideas themselves are woven and nested into the fabric of the film’s form as well as its narrative and the techniques by which the story unfolds.  The structure of Riddles of the Sphinx is a system of nested boxes, like Chinese boxes or Matroyshka dolls, in which the narrative ‘Louise’s story told in thirteen shots’ is nested between the first three sections and the mirroring of the last three sections (i.e. 5 mirrors 3, 6 mirrors 2, and 7 mirrors 1).  These mirrored pairings of the outer sections explore the themes presented at the center of the film—Louise’s story—in experimental visual and poetic terms.  These six outer sections provide a conceptual framework of layered images, language, and ideas in which Louise’s story is embedded.

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

Louise’s story is presented in thirteen shots separated by inter-titles of text from Peter Wollen’s experiments with language.  These thirteen shots trace the development of Louise’s consciousness and her transition and transformation from stasis and the home into movement and politics.  Cinematographer Diane Tammes devised a revolutionary system of 360-degree pans, one for each of the thirteen shots, to represent, through film form, this process of ‘awakening’.  

In conventional cinema, the camera and its look, with which we are made to identify, penetrate space, thrust forward into the framed scene, isolate detail, control where and how we look.  Similarly, the act of editing, of slicing up reality into filmic fragments and re-assembling them in a sweep of masculine creativity, emerges from a constellation of ideas linking scientific objectivity, in which the world is dissected and categorized; Cartesian rationality, in which the mind is prioritized over the body; panoptic control; instrumental reason; and the patriarchal structures that have promulgated these forces. 

The 360-degree pans present moving tableaux without editing.  These shots unfold slowly and steadily, undermining the dramatic climaxes of conventional cinema.  There is a sense of uninterrupted wholeness to these shots.  Characters are not framed in relation to the action, rather characters enter and exit the frame as the camera travels in a circular motion.  As the film works through the marginalization of women, the very formal strategy eliminates the margin of the film frame.  Reality is not being cut up and edited together.  ‘The camera strategy combined with the lack of editing,’ Mulvey explains, ‘was intended to negate possible and expected shifts in look, in order to foreground the “work” involved in cinematic spectatorship, and undercut the looker/looked-at dichotomy that fixes visual pleasure.’  The privileged position of the spectator dissolves, and we are liberated to move our eyes over and through the image, noticing details, making connections, and entering a duration for thought. 

In the eleventh shot, Louise, who has navigated the tribulations of balancing child care and professional life, visits her ex-husband to see a feminist film that he is working on.  She announces that she has decided to sell the house, in which they lived together.  Chris, the ex-husband, tries to convince her that the market is such that it is not a good time to sell.  Louise responds by saying that, ‘it is a good time for me’, thus signifying that she has entered the male-dominated world of business affairs on her own terms.  The 360-degree pan itself evokes this change by a retrograde motion of the camera.  Until this point, the camera panned in a clockwise motion.  Here, the camera pans in a counter-clockwise manner.  This shift in Louise’s developing consciousness is performed cinematically in this shift of the camera’s movement.  

A new film language is unveiled, one which requires a new way of reading against the grain. 

Theory:  The Female Gaze

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

The title of this program uses the notion of a ‘Female Gaze’, which is certainly not Mulvey’s and is, admittedly, problematic at best.  Nevertheless, it is meant to be provocative (as if there is one kind of gaze that is ‘female’, determined by my male desire to appropriate and categorize), but it is also meant to link to Mulvey’s deconstruction of the male gaze in her essay and film.  But unlike the male gaze, which structures a specific kind of spectatorship and relations of power, the concept of the female gaze that I would like to develop here represents neither a simple reversal of the forces in play nor a reduction of such a ‘gaze’ to a specific, fixed mode of viewership. 

Mulvey reminds us that, ‘Throughout this essay, I have referred to the persistent difficulty of articulating the means by which an aesthetic break can find formal expression.  How does an independent aesthetic evolve out of confrontation with a dominant one?’[11]  Feminist films must use the negative critique to break out of patriarchal language in order to develop such an independent aesthetic.  Without moving beyond the negativity of counter-cinema to a cinema made by and for women that opens new ways of thinking with and through film, feminist films risk getting caught within a binary opposition with what it is opposing.

What I want to suggest is that, whereas the ‘Male Gaze’ closes and excludes, the ‘Female Gaze’ represents the opening of possibilities.  Riddles of the Sphinx and Mulvey’s other films are brilliant examples of what can be created outside of patriarchy, but they are simply specific possibilities actualized.  The ‘Female Gaze’ would encapsulate any spectatorship not regulated and dominated by masculine desire that results from formal and narrative innovations that take up issues central to women.  This is to say that the ‘Female Gaze’ is not one, defined thing; it is a multiplicity opening new paths into the future.  ‘The Female Gaze’ represents the conditions of possibility and creativity in filmmaking and in viewership, and yet it exceeds any attempts to categorize it.  We might say that it suggests a certain sensibility, approach, process that result in films that invite other kinds of spectatorship, other modes of contact and engagement with the film (haptic visuality, for example), than the voyeurism of the ocular-centric paradigm of the male gaze.  The ‘Female Gaze’ represents a clearing through which issues of gender inequality and the oppression of women can be thought.  In this sense, the ‘Female Gaze’ is not a gaze at all but signifies the intricate web of embroidered relations explored within a visual and textual fabric layered and woven together by intersecting strands of feminist politics, counter-hegemony, psychoanalytic film theory, and experimental cinema.

Practice:  Weaving and Layering

When seen against the backdrop of Laura Mulvey’s work, each of the nine films, in this screening program, by these four American women experimental filmmakers generate, out of their very diverse praxes, new cinematic worlds, which subvert dominant modes of looking and story-telling.  At the same time and more importantly, these films move beyond the binary oppositions and the aesthetics that they negate to ‘give birth’ to filmmaking practices and modes of spectatorship that return to woman as a subject(ivity) of inquiry. 

 

Jodie Mack Blanket Statement #1:  Home is Where the Heart Is (2012 )   

Without closing off the openness of the ‘Female Gaze’, I would like to bring out the strategies of weaving and layering that we find in the tapestry of image, text, voice, music, sound in Riddles of the Sphinx and that are thematized in the works of Jodie Mack, Martha Colburn, Laura Kraning, and Melika Bass.  Perhaps, one way of thinking about the ‘female gaze’ is through this concept of weaving as a filmmaking praxis that re-positions feminist film as a tapestry.

Laura Mulvey writes that, ‘there has been an important revival of interest in minor arts and crafts, where, allocated their place in the division of labor, women “embroider” their daily work, also drawing attention to the way that women have worked together, without claims to authorship or genius.  A clash arises here between a celebration of the past and a guideline for the future.’[12]  What Mulvey intimates here is that this revival of interest in the ‘minor’ arts and crafts, as opposed to the masculine heroism of ‘great’ art, contains the potential of an emancipatory re-appropriation of what is traditionally seen as women’s work, relegated to the margins of creativity.  Yet, as we see particularly in Jodie Mack’s four films and in Laura Kraning’s Language of Memory, what has been repressed, women’s handicrafts for example, is woven into the fabric of a new creation.  By layering patterns of embroidered images, film itself becomes a woven tapestry in which images of what previously signified the ‘woman’s place’ in the home are redeemed and radically infused with critical and political energy. 

Jodie Mack’s hand-made collage films explore the relationship between graphic cinema and storytelling through a praxis of combining formal techniques and abstract animation.  With a particular interest in fabrics, textiles, and woven patterns, her work studies domestic and recycled materials in order to re-animate cultural detritus thus weaving it into a new cinematic fabric.  Her praxis performs the very subject of her works, in which what has traditionally been women’s work, done in the home by hand, is used visually, conceptually, and formally to create films that are themselves animated celluloid tapestries.  Four of Jodie Mack’s film tapestries are literally woven into the fabric of this screening program.

Martha Colburn also weaves together animated collage films, however her punk aesthetic generates a more overtly political and confrontational praxis.  She appropriates images from popular culture, often re-framing the sexualized nature of women and fusing them with political imagery.  Her films are not simply compilation films, and her intervention into appropriated images is not simply a matter of juxtaposition.  She paints and hand-draws onto the images, thus re-appropriating the imagery appropriated from disparate sources.  There is a process of double appropriation, in which Colburn extracts found footage from its original context, then paints and hand-draws on these images, and animates them into her own tapestries.   In What’s On, Colburn uses TV images and turns them back onto themselves in a devastating and ironic critique of TV culture.

 

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

In her most recent film from 2018, Western Wild…or How I Found Wanderlust & Met Old Shutterhand, Colburn presents a densely layered, self-reflexive, personal essay film that weaves stop motion animation and found footage into a personal journey of discovery.  Through the frame of a documentary about a film-maker making a film about German author Karl May, who fabricated his literary persona and dissociated himself from reality through fantasy and adventure stories, Colburn offers a counter-history to the ideology of the Western genre that mirrors her personal transformation into a woman artist as means to escape the violence and paternalistic parochialism of her small-town Appalachian upbringing.

The differences between Laura Kraning’s praxis and those of Jodie Mack and Martha Colburn could be likened to the oppositions between Andre Bazin’s long-take and Sergei Eisenstein’s montage.  Kraning describes her work as navigating ‘landscape as a repository for memory, cultural mythology, and the technological sublime.’[13]

Laura Kraning Language of Memory (2009)

In Language of Memory, Kraning hand-processes and weaves rayographs of her grandmother’s still negatives from the early 1900s together with intricate abstract patterns from exposing actual strips of her grandmother’s old lace on high contrast film.  Woven through this 16mm film and its sound track, are the inter-twining of a sewing machine and film projector, of the gestures of sewing and splicing film, manual work historically relegated to women.  The layering of temporalities into the fabric of the film, like the functioning of memory, gives voice to a silent past.

Kraning’s latest film Meridian Plain (2016) creates an otherworldly, yet uncannily familiar, landscape excavated out of hundreds of thousands archival still images taken from NASA’s Mars Rover.  Kraning literally transforms the machinic gaze, linked to Cartesian rationality and the ‘objectivity’ of the scientific apparatus as tools of control and surveillance, into a subjective landscape of the mind.  The woman filmmaker appropriates still images captured by the technological eye of a probing machine, works them frame by frame, stitching them together into an enigmatic spatial tapestry.  The machinic gaze is folded back onto itself; art is made out of science, subjectivity and interiority out of objectivity and exteriority.

Melika Bass Creature Companion (2018)

Melika Bass’s 2018 Creature Companion re-situates the female body within a stereotypical landscape whose manicured lawns and picket fences mask the tensions and drives bubbling underneath:  American suburbia.  Two women enter into a mysterious, yet profoundly connected, relationship.  Bass achieves a certain erotic tension, by playing on the viewer’s stereotypical expectation of lesbianism, which is ultimately frustrated by bodies communicating through vibration and symbiotic resonances.  Their bodies undergo movements that seem to make incisions into the idealized suburban surfaces.  The women create a balletic existence in which their movements subvert conventional expectation and operate outside of the dictates of logic and rationality.  The ‘Female Gaze’ becomes allegorical.

The processes of weaving and layering thematized in these films undermine the constructedness and illusion of traditional cinema and reconceive film as a tapestry, as ‘quilting material, folds of velvet’.[14]

…‘a detour through these texts, entombed now in glass, whose enigmatic scripts reminds her of a forgotten history and the power of a different language’[15]…

Copyright © 2019 Christopher Zimmerman

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

For more information about the program screened at the 2019 edition of Images and Views of Alternative Cinema (Nicosia, Cyprus), visit:

Visual Pleasure and the Female Gaze

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

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[1] Mulvey, Laura; ‘Film, Feminism and the Avant-Garde’; Visual and Other Pleasures; Indiana University Press; Bloomington; 1989; p. 123.

[2] Between 1974 and 1983, Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen made six essay films that sought to create a new cinematic language out of the intersections of the Women’s Movement, psychoanalytic theory, semiotics, Hollywood, and counter-cinema.

[3] Mulvey, Laura; ‘Changes:  Thoughts on Myth, Narrative & Historical Experience’; Visual and Other Pleasures; Indiana University Press; Bloomington; 1989; p. 161.

[4] Mulvey, Laura; ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’; Visual and Other Pleasures; Indiana University Press; Bloomington; 1989; p. 14.

[5] Ibid.; p. 16.

[6] Lacan, Jacques; ‘The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience’; Écrits: a Selection; Alan Sheridan, trans.; W.W. Norton & Company; New York; 1977; pp. 1-7.

[7] Mulvey, Laura; ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’; Visual and Other Pleasures; Indiana University Press; Bloomington; 1989; p. 25.

[8] Ibid.; p. 25.

[9] Mulvey, Laura; ‘The Oedipus Myth:  Beyond the Riddles of the Sphinx’; Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’; Visual and Other Pleasures; Indiana University Press; Bloomington; 1989; p. 177.

[10] Mulvey, Laura; ‘Film, Feminism and the Avant-Garde’; Visual and Other Pleasures; Indiana University Press; Bloomington; 1989; p. 125.

[11] Ibid.; p. 112.

[12] Ibid.; p. 112.

[13] Laura Kraning biography:  http://www.laurakraning.com/about

[14] Mulvey, Laura; Wollen, Peter; Riddles of the Sphinx; BFI Production Board; UK; 1977.

[15] Ibid.