Get the Laura Mulvey: Thinking Through Film November season details at the BFI Southbank and on BFI Player here.
Over the last 50 years, Laura Mulvey has made numerous significant interventions into the development of film culture. Her work in theory and visual language, through her groundbreaking writing and filmmaking, is notable. This includes her essential essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, which this year marks its 50th anniversary. Today, the BFI announces further details for the celebratory season, Laura Mulvey: Thinking Through Film. Throughout November and December at BFI Southbank and UK-wide, there will be a selection of her films. Additionally, a newly commissioned video essay by Mulvey will be available on BFI Player.
As previously announced, Laura Mulvey’s BFI Fellowship, the BFI’s highest honour, takes place at BFI Southbank on 4 November. It is an acknowledgement of Mulvey’s multi-faceted achievements over her illustrious career. She is recognised as a significant, influential, and generous presence in international independent film culture. Her work has impacted filmmakers, critics, writers, and academics, while also educating generations of film students.
THE BESTOWAL
The bestowal follows an In Conversation event where Mulvey will share thoughts about her relationship to cinema. She will discuss her extensive writing and career as a filmmaker. It promises to be a conversation about ideas, present and future. Moreover, it will look back at Mulvey’s influential work.
Mulvey’s inquisitive eye has seen her cast her gaze across classical Hollywood, world cinema, the avant-garde, and more. The BFI Southbank season celebrates the collaborative films she made with theorist, author, and filmmaker Peter Wollen. Later, she collaborated with artist and filmmaker Mark Lewis. The eight movies presented employ both drama and documentary. They explore ideas surrounding psychoanalysis, feminist theory, symbolism, formal experimentation, genre, and the legacies of myth. Classics of British independent cinema, her films raise questions about the limits of cinema while continually challenging us to think about our relationship with the moving image.
THE SEASON
One of the cornerstone titles of the season will be Mulvey and Wollen’s landmark work, Riddles of the Sphinx (1977). They drew on their theoretical writings and the influence of avant-garde film. Additionally, they explored ideas through the prism of feminist theory and psychoanalysis. In this visually and narratively groundbreaking film, Mulvey and Wollen experimented with film language. They disrupted and challenged conventions of cinematic spectatorship.
Together, Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen directed six films. Their first collaboration, Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons (1974), is a milestone of feminist avant-garde cinema. Organised into five distinct chapters, the film presents Penthesilea, the Amazonian queen from Greek mythology. It explores patriarchal myth-making and its gender politics. The film questions how women can reclaim their history and how they can reclaim their images within patriarchal culture.
AMY AND FRIDA KAHLO & TINA MODOTTI
Mulvey and Wollen brought us film portraits of two extraordinary women. AMY! (1979) about pilot Amy Johnson was made to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Johnson’s pioneering solo flight to Australia in 1930. Frida Kahlo & Tina Modotti (1983) was commissioned to coincide with the exhibition of Kahlo and Modotti’s work curated by Mulvey and Wollen at the Whitechapel Gallery. It juxtaposes the lives, works and legacies of the two artists.
DIFFERENT STORYTELLING CONVENTIONS
Mulvey and Wollen employ distinct storytelling conventions. They underscore the everyday connections between the personal and the political, as well as the struggles of life in Thatcherite Britain, in Crystal Gazing (1982). Shot on video for Channel 4 in 1983 and incorporating experimental visual effects, The Bad Sister is a complex and fragmentary adaptation of Emma Tennant’s novel of the same name. Jane’s private tape diary opens up the shifting terrains of her rich interior life. Meanwhile, a TV journalist investigates the circumstances surrounding a mysterious double murder. Is Jane involved? Here, Mulvey and Wollen return to some of the concerns that occupied them in Riddles of the Sphinx (1977). They create a space for the unconscious in which different selves emerge and shifts occur between imagination and reality, dreams and waking states.
Mulvey worked with artist and filmmaker Mark Lewis on Disgraced Monuments (1994) and 23rd August 2008 (2013). These works assume striking relevance today in the wake of debates about statues and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The documentary Disgraced Monuments illustrates how statues in Russia have been used to uphold and embody eruptive changes in centralised state ideology. Mulvey and Lewis juxtapose interviews with Russian museum staff and archival materials. They explore the links between art, history, and politics. 23rd August 2008, made with Faysal Abdullah, presents a monologue by Abdullah. It gradually builds a portrait of his relationship with his younger brother, Kamel. In the process, it evokes the lives of Iraqi intellectuals of the left, driven into exile in the early 1980s by Saddam Hussein’s regime.
INTRODUCTION AND Q&A
Mulvey will introduce screenings for each of her films. She will take part in Q&As for AMY! and Frida Kahlo & Tina Modotti on 11 November. Additionally, Q&As for Disgraced Monuments and 23rd August 2008 will be on 27 November. A selection of her films will also be available to screen on BFI Player. This includes a new video essay by Mulvey commissioned by BFI. Mulvey’s work is also the subject of a one-day symposium on 22 November. The symposium features a program of talks and discussions, providing a deeper exploration of the various facets of Laura Mulvey’s extensive career, including her filmmaking, writing, and programming.
The season also includes Experimenta: Riddles of the Sphinx in Context. This is a selection of visually striking, experimental films chosen by Laura Mulvey, which gave context to and informed the development of her and Peter Wollen’s iconic work.
CLASSICS
Hollis Frampton’s experimental classic, Zorn’s Lemma (1970), introduced by Mulvey on 17 November, made a deep impression on Mulvey and Wollen, playing on sequential associations between the alphabet and the visual recognition of objects, images and symbols. Peter Wollen’s Counter Cinema essay, shaped Mulvey and Wollen’s approach to filmmaking and was inspired by Jean-Luc Godard and the Dziga Vertov Group’s Brechtian Le Vent d’est/Wind from the East (1970), a revolutionary story of a kidnapped global business executive, told using audacious formal strategies. A key figure of Brazil’s New Cinema movement, Glauber Rocha’s bold revisionist western, Antonio das Mortes (1969), sees its titular hero turn against his former masters and commit to revolution. Mulvey and Wollen were particularly impressed by Rocha’s use of folk legend and a re-telling of history as ‘history from below’.
Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s experimental narrative, The Bridegroom, the Actress and the Pimp (1968), at once formally rigorous and deeply inspired, tells a story of liberation from oppression – interweaving that of the cinema with that of a sex worker. The film incorporates performance by the Munich Action-Theatre, an immediate forerunner to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Anti-Theatre productions of the late 1960s. Straub and Huillet cast Hermann, Schygulla and Raben (who became regulars of the Fassbinder acting ensemble) alongside Fassbinder himself in a radical, condensed staging of Ferdinand Brückner’s 1926 play Pains of Youth.
BIG SCREEN CLASSICS STRAND
In December, BFI Southbank’s regular Big Screen Classics strand will feature films chosen by Mulvey, which have featured in her groundbreaking writing, creating an interesting dialogue with the programme for Too Much: Melodrama on Film, which will include a keynote season introduction with Mulvey.
Laura Mulvey: Thinking Through Film kicks off on 29 October with a special 25 and Under Introductory event, providing an overview of Mulvey’s influential critical writing and discussing its relationship to her work as a filmmaker.
Introducing Carl! As the News Editor at Future of the Force, Carl has been an invaluable member of our team since early 2016. His expertise and dedication have made him an integral part of our editorial staff. Beyond his professional role, Carl is a fervent supporter of Liverpool F.C. and an avid follower of pop culture. He has a deep passion for Halloween, Friday the 13th, and the iconic movie franchises Star Wars and Star Trek.
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