Weaving, Layering, Dispersal:
from politics to theory to praxis
Laura Mulvey in conversation
with Christopher Zimmerman
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| Laura Mulvey & Peter Wollen Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) |
Christopher
Zimmerman: The screening program ‘Visual Pleasure and the
Female Gaze’ takes your 1975 essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ as
the ‘organizing principle’ or, perhaps, the basic fabric for the selection of
films. Can you share your thoughts as to
how this essay is woven into your larger body of work, emerging out of
organizing within the Women’s Movement and leading into filmmaking?
Laura
Mulvey: If you wanted to ask about the 70s and how
everything emerged, maybe we can talk about that in a minute? Perhaps, we could begin just by thinking
about where I am now.
CZ: Where are
you now?
Laura
Mulvey: My last book was Death 24x a Second, which is about questions of spectatorship that
did not really involve women or feminism.
In a sense, there is a feminist angle because I cannot really help
that. But I was interested in other kinds
of questions, particularly ones of time and different kinds of spectatorial
relationships with film. The long time I
spent on developing that book was more about thinking about the crisis of
cinema and the crisis of cinema spectatorship and not so much about feminism.
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| Laura Mulvey & Peter Wollen Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) |
Since Death
24, which was published twelve years ago, I’ve been going back more to
different ideas about women and film.
This new book is a collection of essays, of essays that I have written
and lectures that I have given since 2006. The theme of time is still important, but I
have come back to questions of women. What
I’ve been trying to deal with is, in the first instance, to bring to an end the
long, discontinuous dialogue I’ve had with Hollywood and the question of woman
as spectacle and gendered spectatorships.
So, the first section of my new book is called
‘The Last Chapter’. In the first place,
I am saying, “These are the things that I’m never going to write about or talk
about ever again.” And, so it’s my last
thoughts about woman as spectacle.
And then the book ends with an appendix called ‘Visual
and Other Pleasures: Frequently Asked
Questions’, FAQs. I have ten FAQs that
people have genuinely asked me over the years about the essay. So, the idea now is to bring together a lot
of the different threads and strands, possibly tie them up a bit, and try to
say that this is, in a sense, the end of this particular line of thought. I have tried to say this before but without
much success.
But, the main part of the book, which is called ‘A
New Chapter’, is about recent films by women.
I’m trying to think about new ways of thinking about women and film and
how that might vary, differ, develop, and progress from the kind of negative
aesthetic that Peter [Wollen] and I had in mind, or the kind of counter-cinema
aesthetic that we had in mind in the ‘70s.
CZ: Was there
a certain necessity or a different urgency around the time of Death 24x that resulted in your turning
to questions of time and the crisis of cinema and away from the feminist and
psychoanalytic critique of your earlier work?
What was the larger context out of which this book emerged?
Laura
Mulvey: Yes, yes.
I wrote ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ within specific
technological and spectatorial conditions.
That was a way of going to the cinema, the old way of ‘seeing the
movies’, which I felt was very tied to the arguments and the theoretical
speculations that I was making at the time.
Around 1995, which was simultaneously the arrival
of DVD and digital spectatorship, replacing electronic spectatorship, and also
the centenary of cinema, it seemed to me it was a moment when I could then draw
a line under ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ and say now there are
completely different conditions. And
different kinds of spectatorships are at stake and at work. Different kinds of pleasures and also opening
up ways of thinking about conventional narrative cinema, in ways that can open
up questions, aesthetics.
CZ: With the ‘possessive
spectator’ and the ‘pensive spectator’, as you discuss in Death 24x a Second, you are exploring modes of spectatorship outside
of the dominant and codified. There are
other possibilities of spectatorship.
Laura
Mulvey: Yes, but there are also modes of
spectatorship, which, I felt at the time, would become more and more
prevalent. More and more, people would
no longer watch films in the traditional way, and they would then experiment
with new forms of spectatorship. Now, this is and isn’t the case. People go on going to the cinema; they go on
watching films in the old circumstances.
But, I think that their way of relating to the cinematic image has
shifted because they don’t have the experience that I grew up with…
CZ: Sitting in
the dark with others…
Laura
Mulvey: Exactly, and that being the only way to see a
film. But on the other hand, I am often
struck by when I ask people whether they watch movies in the way I suggested in
Death 24x a Second: pausing, rewinding, stopping… They generally
say they don’t.
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| Laura Mulvey & Peter Wollen Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) |
CZ: Your analysis of these other modes of
spectatorship made possible by the digital
brings us back to your essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ in
which you psychoanalyze or deconstruct the male gaze found at the center of
Hollywood narrative film. One of the things that I admire in your
writings and films is your ability to navigate between the particular and the
universal, in a sense. Your theoretical speculations are firmly
rooted in concrete political situations, and your films develop a praxis in which your theoretical commitments are
thought through on the screen. Can you
return to the 1970s and describe the
context out of which your early theoretical work and your films emerged? What instigated the move from theory to film practice?
Laura
Mulvey: All of this is very important. Thinking back, I realized that a lot was
actually changing in the world in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, and there were
three things that particularly affected me.
One was the impact of the Women’s Movement. That was important from two particular points
of view. The Women’s Movement was an
introduction to theory and ideas through my reading group.
CZ: So, in some ways, politics first opened up
theory to you?
Laura Mulvey: Yes, one
of the first slogans of the Women’s Movement was: the female body as a site of struggle. This had all to do with questions about
reproduction, childcare, sexualities, and so on. This is the first kind of ‘instance’.
The first obvious thing was my involvement in the
Miss World Competition, which I write about in the very first essay in Visual and Other Pleasures [Mulvey’s
first book]. Here, I began to think
about the question of spectacle. This,
in a sense, leads on to the next site, as it were. If the woman’s body is a site of struggle
then the representation and images of her body are also sites of struggle. Where the actual body in real life led on to
social, political, economic issues, the image of woman’s body as a site of
struggle led on to psychoanalysis and semiotics because the first principle was
to dissociate the image from the referent—to establish that this object on the
screen or in commodity culture didn’t refer to women but referred to a
completely different sphere of imagination and fantasy, which could only be
accessed through theoretical tools.
So, that is why there was a direct link, as you
say completely correctly, from the politics to the theory. At the same time, of course, we were
fortunate that the theory was beginning to circulate. That was one of the other things that was
changing around the time. So there was
the impact of the Women’s Movement but also the new interest in psychoanalysis.
French theorists began to be translated.
There was a new sense of the bankruptcy of English culture and English
traditions, and there were intellectual energies coming from other parts of the
world: post-colonial cinema and theory
and so on. So, there was a sense of
looking for new things.
But, also around this time too, the backdrop of
the Hollywood movies that I loved during the ‘60s had come to an end. Hollywood was no longer an industrial entity,
nor was there a critical dynamic any longer.
It had come to an end. And, lot’s
of new cinema was pouring in from around the world. We were seeing new cinema from Brazil,
radical Godard… and then what had a particular influence on me, seeing: Chantal Akerman, Yvonne Rainer, VALIE EXPORT…
But from an art-historical point of view, our
aesthetic emerged out of feminism and out of the negativity or counter-culture
of feminism. But also, it was the moment
of conceptualism and minimalism. Women
might not have wanted to recognize that they were influenced by anything except
themselves and their own political instincts and principles. But, if you think of the kinds of films that
people started to make in that period, that kind of conceptualist, minimalist,
structural film background is important.
Although I think that the feminist aesthetic was more prepared to work
with narrative and to work with ideas…
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| Laura Mulvey & Peter Wollen Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) |
CZ: Since we are in a retrospective mode, you recently
wrote an essay for Timothy Corrigan and Nora Alter’s collection of essays on
the essay film (2017), in which you remarked that you were surprised that you
and Peter Wollen saw your films as ‘theoretical’ rather than as essays at the
time. But now, you do see, for example, Riddles of the Sphinx as an essay
film. In what ways has the essay film,
and personal cinema in general, synched up with feminist modes of
filmmaking? Or, perhaps, what is it
about the essay that opens up critical and creative territory that might be
otherwise denied by more traditional modes of filmmaking?
Laura
Mulvey: I think that that is absolutely right. The essay as such as a written object
involves, as all of the theorists now writing about the essay film point out,
both a personal side and an interest in ideas, but ideas which are not highly
academically or philosophically presented, but more personally and intuitively
theorized.
CZ: Chris
Marker’s cinema? For example…
Laura
Mulvey: Yes, exactly.
And also, a commitment, as it were, to a more unfinished, heterogeneous
form of composition. It is more approachable
than the high-academic essay.
With ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, it is
very important to understand that I was not in any academic context at the
time. I often say that it couldn’t have
been written earlier because it could not have been written without the
influence of feminism, and it could not have been written any later because the
context of film studies would have made it very difficult to be so sweeping,
generalizing, and slightly unforgiving to the reader.
CZ: This all
emerged out of very particular, concrete situations… Could you talk specifically about your turn
to film-making? You mentioned, which I
found fascinating, that it was politics that opened up the world of theory to
you; you are then theorizing, writing essays, and you turn to filmmaking as if
you are returning to the practical, to the concrete. I know that this is an over-simplification,
but I see your films Penthesilea and Riddles of the Sphinx as an emergence of
a praxis in which you are exploring the theoretical commitments that you were
making in your writings.
Laura
Mulvey: Yes, that is absolutely true. That works, exactly. Just to transfer the general cultural
contingencies within which we were existing, there was beginning to be a sense
that another kind of cinema could exist.
There was the idea that it was possible to make films that were
intellectual, theoretical, speculative but also interested in experimenting
with the relationship between word and image.
So, bringing the whole question of how an image works into a theoretical
context.
Peter always said that you can have documentary
film, you can have poetic films, you can have artist films, why shouldn’t you
have idea films, theory films? He was
interested in late-Godard when working on his ‘counter-cinema’. Peter was primarily a writer, much more than
I was. We were interested in pushing
language and writing into a critical zone, as it were, within the context of
what kind of a language would another politics mean? What kind of language would a feminist
politics mean? And that played very
directly with Peter’s own writing experiments.
It’s also important to keep in mind how important
the radical independent film movement in the UK around that time was. People were experimenting across the board
from the most extreme structural artist film to straight-forward agitational
chaos and all kinds of experiments in between.
This was a movement that did, for a short time, talk to each other and
share their films together. There was a
sense that there wasn’t one single answer to these questions but that they
should be pursued in very different kinds of ways. People had their own ways of engaging, and it
should be possible within our movement to find dialogues across these
things. So, there was quite a strong
sense of people coming from very different directions and backgrounds, but
there was a collective desire to question what cinema meant, as it were, and
how it could make meaning politically.
What it meant in terms of its history and where it came from and how it
could make meaning politically in the future.
CZ: There was
momentum…
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| Laura Mulvey & Peter Wollen Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) |
Laura
Mulvey: Certainly.
There was a strong sense of looking back to the 1920s and the kind of
1920s movement, but there was a real sense of momentum and that these
discussions could be taken further. But,
actually, it didn’t happen because, one of the other things that was very
important around that time was that people like us, I think, would not have
made movies unless these possibilities came into reality through institutional
support and financial support. With
1979, all that kind of infrastructure began to fall away. And also, Thatcherism was very disorientating
to what Annette Michelson called ‘the utopian aspirations of the avant-garde’,
and our utopian aspirations were facing a rather grim reality: the disorientation and depression of the
early 1980s.
CZ: Can you
talk about the process behind Riddles of
the Sphinx? It is an essay film,
which always has an ‘authorial voice’, but your film was made in duo; there
were two of you, you and Peter, as well as your team of collaborators. Even right here, this notion of authorial
intention is dispersed throughout the entire apparatus and process. Can you talk about this collaborative, collective process?
Laura
Mulvey: You have to remember that we made Riddles at a time when authorship was
under a cloud. The idea of claiming
authorship was not really an issue. It
was more a question of working out how to work together, which wasn’t really a
problem for Peter and me. Our mutual
interest in ideas and film had been at the basis of our relationship for ages
and ages. The ideas we really worked out
very collectively. And the strategies,
the 360-degree pans and things like that, we worked up. I would just say that with the writing you
can see Peter working through his interest in experimental language, which, of
course, then relates, on the one hand, to a questioning of language as the
patriarchal symbolic, but also his interest in semiotics and linguistics, which
was a professional interest.
CZ: What is
the source of the texts that separate the thirteen pans of Louise’s story? Is this from some sort of script?
Laura
Mulvey: This is again typical Peter, literally
typical Peter. All they are is that
little square thing with nothing before or after.
CZ: You get a
sense of stage directions, but they hang there elliptically…
Laura
Muley: But, it also comes from the way we thought
about the pans as tableaux, with, perhaps, a kind of Brechtian twist to
it. These were tableaux forms and a kind
of word-image-object, almost like a narrational equivalent of concrete poetry.
CZ: On the
second evening of the program, we will also screen nine films by four American
women, feminist filmmakers. I selected
these works because each, in its own way, critiques the male gaze but, more
importantly, also attempts to answer your call for productive, creative cinema
that explores what might be called a ‘female gaze’. I certainly see your work as offering and
nurturing one such mode (or set of modes) of spectatorship (and, of course, the
other films in the program do so as well, but in different ways). What would a female gaze be? I know that this is not your term. Do you cringe at this idea of a ‘female
gaze’?
Laura
Mulvey: Yes, I do.
It is partly because, from quite early on, and this is something Peter
and I talked about, and I think that it is there in Penthesilea, we always felt reversals were a dead-end. If you thought about some kind of male
fantasy and reversed it, it would only take you into another dead-end. And, I
always thought the idea of a female gaze was, to a certain extent, a bit of a
long shot.
Also, one of the things that comes with women’s
work in cinema is new ways of telling stories as well as new ways of using the
camera. So, perhaps, the emphasis on the
camera, the instrument of viewing, can become more dispersed. This is from a filmmaker who made Riddles of the Sphinx with 360-degree
pans. So, I can see that I might be
accused of fetishizing the camera, to a certain extent.
But, I feel that a lot of the ways in which
women’s filmmaking works is thinking of what kinds of topics and ideas are
important for women, and, out of that, what kind of ways can be imagined for
putting them on the screen? So the idea
of a female gaze might be one of them, but it wouldn’t necessarily be a central
configuration. It would be much more a
question of dispersal.
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| Laura Mulvey & Peter Wollen Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) |
CZ: I was
thinking of the female gaze, not as a simple reversal or in any reductive sense,
but as the possibilities outside of or beyond the male gaze. A certain sensibility, approach, process that
result in films that invite other kinds of spectatorship, other modes of
contact and engagement with the film, than the voyeurism of the male gaze. ‘Haptic visuality’, for example. There could not be one female gaze… Perhaps it would be a question of opening a
territory or a set of themes? Or
creating a new cinematic language?
Laura
Mulvey: Thinking about the womens’ films that I was
writing about in my recent book... In fact, we are getting back to Riddles of the Sphinx, in a sense, in
that all of the films revolve around the question of the mother, the
representation of the mother. So, all
these films revolve around muteness.
The visibility of the mute, as it were, and what kind of stories of this
kind of weaving of the past, the maternal past, into a new layered culture and
what that would involve.
CZ: I wanted
to ask you about this notion of weaving, which you mention on multiple
occasions in your books, in particular in Visual
and Other Pleasures and fetishism and
curiosity. I selected four of Jodie
Mack’s short films for this program.
Jodie is particularly interested in fabrics and textile patterns, which
she treats in experimental ways, which are the result of ‘women’s work’. The way that she weaves her films performs
the very act of weaving that results in the textiles. Laura Kraning’s film The Language of Memory uses rayographs of her grandmother’s
negatives of her sewing machine and embroidery.
The idea here being that weaving is literally woven into the
program. This leads me to the intricate
weaving and layering of image, sound, music, voice, text in Riddles.
Can you elaborate on this idea of weaving and layering? Of re-situating what has traditionally been
regarded as women’s work in a film that attempts to weave together a new
language? Film as tapestry…
Laura
Mulvey: I think that ‘weaving’ is a concept that I
certainly use. This line of thought
emerged out of an interest in found footage and compilation film. This fits in with Laura Kraning’s film. What I was interested in around the found
footage / compilation film was how there is an essential dislocation of
temporality between the footage that is found, that comes from the past, and
its re-editing and its re-narrativization into a new thing, a new object. But, if there is a political message coming
from the past, from the muteness of the past, how does the thing itself pass
that message on to its future audience?
So, rather than the film being a finished film, the film has to find a
way of mediating between. So, this is a
kind of layering, not only of past and its re-configuration, but also how to
build that address to the future.
Even the most conventional found footage film, Ken
Burns and so on, involves this dislocation of temporality. If that dislocation of temporality is
re-worked around bringing political issues of the past out and toward the
future, then this dislocation of temporality can find another voice, which is
essentially one of weaving or layering.
Questions of weaving and layering, for me, have been of recent interest
in terms of time, layering of time.
CZ: In terms
of an audience of the future, what are our most pressing challenges today? How should things be developed today?
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| Laura Mulvey & Peter Wollen Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) |
Laura
Mulvey: The gap between the kinds of hope and
aspirations that we had in the 1970s and the bleakness of today is very stark
indeed. The world has moved backwards,
rather than forwards. In climates of
what they call ‘economic austerity’, women are immediately hit worse than
anyone else. Post-industrialization, overlaid
by the politics of economic austerity, might take us back to having to address,
rather than addressing just the women’s question, the whole people’s question. Perhaps, that is what we are addressing now
more and more. Women, rather than
concentrating completely on what is happening to women, have to think about how
women can bring their way of thought to addressing the problems of the world,
to addressing all of the social problems that we see around us, and working
across the whole people. In a sense, a
concentration on women and women’s issues belonged, perhaps, to the ‘60s and
‘70s. It was a moment of relative
optimism, freedom, and social support.
CZ: Our audience in Nicosia will be seeing Riddles of the Sphinx for the first
time. Can you give our audience some ‘advice’
as they approach Riddles?
Laura
Mulvey: One point I would make is that, just as I
said about the Visual Pleasure essay, this kind of film comes out of a very
short window of opportunity. I see it
not only as part of our movement in the UK, our independent filmmakers
association movement, but also linking internationally to Chantal Akerman and
Yvonne Rainer and other women filmmakers of the time who were trying to make
large-scale films. On the one hand,
women’s filmmaking had tended to be the short, poetic form or the longer art
film form. These were ambitious films
that were made out of a kind of confidence that came with the moment and the
kind of confidence that you associate with an extraordinary film like Jeanne Dielman.
So we have to see them as rooted in their
moment. Although that moment didn’t
really survive for various reasons, there is a kind of coherence to that
time: an interest in narrative, an
interest in telling stories, interweaving temporalities, a return to the
mother, various kinds of primal things.
Rooting it in its time is important. But, I think that it is also worth saying
that I have noticed, over the last years, that a younger generation has been
looking back at these films and at this period.
There is a real revival of interest in them. Why? I
am not quite sure. But there genuinely
does seem to be. I was thinking just the
other day that it’s almost the same lapse of time as we, in the late ‘60s and
early ‘70s, thought back to the avant-garde in the 1920s as young people today
look back to the ‘70s.
CZ: Doesn’t this
speak to the power of the film? It is
completely rooted in that time, but people are interested because it still
resonates.
Transcribed from a recording of a conversation
that unfolded via skype on January 18, 2019.
Copyright © 2019 Laura Mulvey and Christopher
Zimmerman
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| Jodie Mack Unsubscribe #2: All Eyes on the Silver Screen (2010) |
Visual Pleasure and the Female Gaze
Essay: From Confrontation to Creativity by Christopher Zimmerman
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