Son[i]a #244
Laura Mulvey
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.
Isaac Julien
The work of Isaac Julien moves through liminal spaces. Overlapping zones between photography, film, and installation; choreography and dance; poetry and music… and the infinite possible versions, iterations, and variations that can emerge from systematic work with the archive. Intersections in which fiction, documentary, narrative, and radicality converge to produce aesthetically meticulous and politically powerful imaginaries and stories that challenge white heterosexual film conventions through their temporalities, narrative construction, and aesthetic forms. In this podcast, Isaac Julien talks about the need to give a voice and body to dissident black identity and desire in the cinematic imaginary, about expanded cinema and choreographic montage; and about his constant shifts between the worlds of art, video art, and film.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Nina Power that we were unable to include the first time around.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Griselda Pollock that we were unable to include the first time around.
Nina Power
Nina Power shares her thoughts on the ideological power of language, on systems of state violence, surveillance and control, and on the need to reverse the savage logic of neoliberalism through strategies such as commoning and her own notion of “decapitalism”.
Griselda Pollock
Griselda Pollock talks about her involvement in the Women’s Movement in England in the seventies, and about the points of convergence between feminism and art history. Pollock advocates the need to decentralise and diversify knowledge, and to design resistance strategies specific to each socio-political context. And, last but not least, also reflects on memory technologies, trauma, Oedipal and mother-child relationships, narratives of progress, and Bracha Ettinger’s matrixial ethics.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Laura Mulvey that we were unable to include the first time around.
Lizzie Borden
American filmmaker and activist Lizzie Borden talks about her first three films -"Re-grouping” (1976), "Born in Flames" (1983) i "Working Girls" (1986)-, about inductive and deductive filmmaking, about filming without a script, about the importance of editing, about style, about the use of documentary strategies in fiction films, about alternative distribution as a form of activism, about the lack of women in the film world and about her notion of television as the future of audiovisual media.
Marysia Lewandowska
Marysia Lewandowska talks about the Women’s Audio Archive, about the crucial need to generate counter-narratives in totalitarian regimes, about networking before networks, about the boundaries between the private and the public, the negotiations generated by the shift from one sphere to another, the responsibilities of the archive, and the potential to generate conversation through art.