Laura Mulvey
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Laura Mulvey (born August 15, 1941) is a British feminist film theorist. She was educated at Oxford and is currently professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. She worked at the British Film Institute for many years before taking up her current position.
Mulvey is best known for her essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", written in 1973 and published in 1975 in the influential British film theory journal Screen. (It also appears in a collection of her essays entitled Visual and Other Pleasures and numerous other anthologies.) This article was one of the first major essays that helped shift the orientation of film theory towards a psychoanalytic framework, influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Prior to Mulvey, film theorists such as Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz attempted to use psychoanalytic ideas in their theoretical accounts of the cinema, but Mulvey's contribution was to inaugurate the intersection of film theory, psychoanalysis, and feminism.
Mulvey’s article argues mainly that the cinematic apparatus (specifically of classical Hollywood cinema) inevitably puts the spectator in a masculine subject position, with the figure of the woman on screen as the object of desire. In classical Hollywood cinema, viewers are encouraged to identify with the protagonist of the film, who tends to be a man. Meanwhile, female characters are, according to Mulvey, coded with "to-be-looked-at-ness." Mulvey argues that the only way to annihilate this "patriarchal" system is to radically deconstruct the filmic strategies of classical Hollywood with alternative methods. She calls for a new feminist avant-garde filmmaking that will rupture the magic and pleasure of classical Hollywood filmmaking. “It is said that analysing pleasure or beauty annihilates it. That is the intention of this article”.
"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" was the subject of much interdisciplinary discussion that continued into the 1980s. Critics of the article objected to the fact that her argument implied the impossibility of genuine 'feminine' enjoyment of the classical Hollywood cinema, and to the fact that her argument did not seem to take into account spectatorships that were not organised along the normative lines of gender (for example, a metaphoric 'transvestism' might be possible when viewing a film -- a male viewer might enjoy a 'feminine' point-of-view provided by a film, or vice versa; gay and lesbian spectatorships might also be different). Mulvey later said that this article was meant to be a provocation or a manifesto, rather than a coldly reasoned academic article that took all objections into account. However, she addressed many of her critics in a follow-up article "Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'" (which also appears in the Visual and Other Pleasures collection).
Another collection of her essays is titled Fetishism and Curiosity.
Mulvey was also prominent as an avant-garde filmmaker in the 1970s and 1980s. With Peter Wollen, she co-wrote and co-directed Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons (1974), Riddles of the Sphinx (1977 - perhaps their most influential film), AMY! (1980), Crystal Gazing (1982), Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (1982), and The Bad Sister. In 1991, she returned to filmmaking with Disgraced Monuments.
Mulvey is currently working on a book entitled Death Twenty-four Times a Second: Reflections on Stillness in the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, forthcoming, 2005).