• 02:55 "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema": a political manifesto
  • 03:35 Why Hollywood and why Freud
  • 05:05 Other cinemas taking over in the 60s
  • 06:00 The Women's Movement changed the way I looked at cinema
  • 10:10 How to understand "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema": it's all about the context
  • 13:14 The Male Gaze
  • 16:36 The financial crash and the coming of sound
  • 20:50 The queer gaze
  • 21:46 The universal whiteness of Hollywood
  • 24:52 Cinema as an instrument of thinking
  • 31:10 Narrative and stories are also crucial
  • 32:25 Oral history, histories from below and compilation films
  • 37:03 "Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image": temporality and change in modes of spectatorship
  • 41:00 Pause, elongation, edition: liberating different gazes
31/07/2017 45' 59''
English

Deeply involved in second wave feminism, in 1975 Laura Mulvey published the essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, widely considered a seminal feminist film theory text. Conceived as a manifesto – as Mulvey explains in this conversation – her provocative essay applied psychoanalytic theory to the imaginary produced by the cinematic apparatus of classical Hollywood cinema from the thirties to the sixties, in which the man is the bearer of the look, and the woman is the image.

Mulvey advocated a political reading of the psychoanalytic ideas and concepts (such as voyeurism, scopophilia, fetishism, fear of castration...), transferring the binarisms proposed by Freud to classical film narrative. In the text, Mulvey also coined the notion of the “male gaze” to refer to the power asymmetry in representation and assigned gender roles, thus emphasising the patriarchal ideological agenda of the American film industry.

Laura Mulvey engages in film practice from all possible angles: as filmmaker, screenwriter, essayist, critic, academic, and teacher. Through her films – at first with Peter Wollen, later on her own –, her involvement with the British Film Institute, and her academic work at Birkbeck College, University of London, Mulvey has explored critical approaches to film theory and its intersection with her interests in the semiotics of the image, left-wing and feminist theory, and the possibilities of disrupting linearity and temporality.

In this SON[I]A, Laura Mulvey contextualises, updates, and elucidates on the far-reaching impact of this key text, which she revised in later essays such as “Death 24 x a Second. Stillness and the moving image”. At the same time, she opens up the debate with the notions of the “queer gaze” and the “universal whiteness” of Hollywood. Mulvey also defends orality as a form of "history from below", citing the example of “compilation films” (films that use archival footage re-written with new narrative) as a space for a new feminist film practice.

Son[i]aLaura Mulveyfeminismcinema#PEImacba#8Mcinema in the white cube

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