On Sunday 26 April, 6.00pm (GMT) we’ll be in conversation on via Facebook Live with British Feminist Film Theorist, Laura Mulvey. 

Mulvey is best known for her groundbreaking 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” which brought the term the ‘Male Gaze’ into commonplace vocabulary. It remains a landmark text in film studies, combining film theory with a political use of psychoanalysis and feminism to assert that narrative film traditionally revolves around male spectatorship of the objectified female body. It is out of this we use the term ‘the female gaze’ which centres everything we show.

Lesser known, Mulvey was prominent as an avant-garde filmmaker in the 1970s and 1980s. Her most influential work Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) was inspired by “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” is available to rent now on BFI Player.

Riddles of the Sphinx explores issues of female representation, the place of motherhood within society and the relationship between mother and daughter.

Composed of a number of discrete sections, many of which are shot as continuous circular pans, the film takes place in a range of domestic and public spaces, shot in locations which include artist Malcolm LeGrice’s kitchen and experimental filmmaker Stephen Dwoskin’s bedroom. The film’s ground-breaking electronic score, by The Soft Machine’s Mike Ratledge, was composed on synthesisers which were developed in collaboration with Denys Irving (the man behind the mysterious and controversial 1970s band Lucifer).