Laura Mulvey (b. 1941) is best known for the groundbreaking essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1973, published 1975) in which she coined the term ‘male gaze’ and tackled the asymmetry at the heart of cinema – the centrality of the male viewer and his pleasure. The ideas developed throughout her long career as both film theorist and filmmaker have cast a long shadow, continuing to influence a host of other thinkers and makers, many of whom appear in this journal. At present, she is professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London.
Another Gaze – Could you start by telling me a little about what was latterly termed your ‘cinephile period’, before your involvement in the theorising of and making of films?
Laura Mulvey – I was born in 1941 and lived in the countryside for the whole of the war so I didn’t see any films until I came back to London at the age of six. Because of this, I remember the first films I ever saw quite clearly. I think the first was Nanook of the North [Robert J. Flaherty, 1922], because my father was from the far North of Canada and was interested in Inuit culture. The other films that stand out very vividly for me, from the early fifties, are Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes [1948] and Jean Renoir’s The River [1951]. I sometimes think that it’s because I didn’t see many films in my childhood that these two films are indelibly marked on my cinematic unconscious. My genuinely cinephile days started when I left university and started going to the cinema with a group of friends, including Peter Wollen. These friends were all influenced by the Cahiers du Cinéma, so that marked a shift into an adoration of Hollywood, and of those directors that the Cahiers had sanctified as part of the ‘politique des auteurs’. That took up a great deal of my time in the sixties… Going to see films that weren’t so current but hadn’t fallen out of currency, and the National Film Theatre was beginning to show retrospectives, and we were going to Paris, the Cinémathèque and any of the cinemas on the Left Bank, and building up as much of a knowledge of Hollywood cinema as we could.
AG – And what did you see this knowledge as being for? Or was it just pleasure?
LM – Yes, pleasure. I think it was just pure enjoyment of going to the cinema. I remember reading the Cahiers during what’s now referred to as ‘the yellow period’, but it was really accumulating the films and absorbing the culture, quite unreflectively, from my point of view at least – just for pleasure.
AG – So when did this reflectiveness kick in? Was it from watching more avant-garde cinema, where the techniques were made deliberately more visible?
LM – No, my shift in spectatorship came very suddenly and specifically out of the influence of the women’s movement, so that I was suddenly watching films that I’d loved and films that had moved me with different eyes. Instead of being absorbed into the screen, into the story, into the mise-en-scène, into the cinema, I was irritated. And instead of being a voyeuristic spectator, a male spectator as it were, I suddenly became a woman spectator who watched the film from a distance and critically, rather than with those absorbed eyes.
AG – Do you find that [your partner at the time] Peter Wollen felt the same? Or do you think it was almost instinctive?
LM – That’s a good question. Peter had a much more culturally complicated take on cinema than I did, because he’d always taken a modernist approach to art. During the sixties, he was one of the first people to revive interest in the Soviet avant-garde of the twenties. At the same time, I think that your question about the avant-garde is correct, because Hollywood was beginning to fade away. It was no longer the great cinema it had been in the past, and times were changing. Peter became very caught up with new avant-garde tendencies and was becoming very influenced by Godard. Around the late sixties, early seventies, when I started being influenced by feminism, whole new types of cinema were appearing in London that hadn’t been seen before. New Brazilian cinema, Godard, Straub-Huillet, African cinema: much more radical ways of approaching storytelling but also ways of visualising ideas and thinking cinematically.
At the time, we felt very strongly that Hollywood was finished. If you’d asked me… in 1972, I would have said that Hollywood would continue to make films, but that it would no longer have the power – either cinematic or industrial – that it had possessed before.
AG – And how did you first encounter the women’s movement?
LM –It was in 1970 in London, through friends who’d been at the first ever meeting at Ruskin College, Oxford in 1969. After this, new groups started to form rapidly, and I was part of a group that has been very much discussed and a certain amount written about, called either the History Group or the Feminist Studies Group. That was where, amongst a number of other theoretical writers, we started to read Freud and that had a very immediate influence. I mean, it was almost as though Freud could offer a vocabulary and a way of thinking about gender and sexuality that we had always needed. Without necessarily agreeing with everything he’d said, we could find ways of articulating the questions and issues we were interested in.
AG – What was the group’s immediate reaction to the suggestion of reading Freud? Excitement or suspicion?
LM – Certainly, to most of the group, it seemed like an extremely exciting prospect and, of course, Juliet Mitchell had just written her book Psychoanalysis and Feminism [1974], so that was very much part of the influence and the environment. I’m sure there would have been quite a lot of critical reaction as well, but as more feminists started writing about it, more of us became interested. I think feminism would always have looked at Freud from a critical perspective. But, just because we thought that he was wrong about many things to do with women, that didn’t mean that his concept of the unconscious and formulation of the Oedipus complex couldn’t be very politically relevant, interesting and immediate.
AG – So was it after reading Freud that you started to go to the cinema, bringing your psychoanalytical thinking to your viewing? Or was that catalysed by the women’s movement?
LM – The two came very much together. So you could say that by the time I wrote ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in 1975, Hollywood cinema was very much the backdrop. But, at the same time, my own perspective had shifted enormously to take in feminism, psychoanalytic theory and, increasingly, avant-garde aesthetics. As I said, the whole world was changing. Hollywood was always extremely useful for two main reasons. First, it was the cinema that I knew and loved so well. Second, it was extremely appropriate for this kind of analysis: it was as though Hollywood laid itself out like a beautiful backdrop and almost invited psychoanalytic and feminist critical analysis. The voyeurism; the place of the male star protagonist in fighting off the object of the gaze and creating the energy of the story; the woman as spectacle – it was somehow all there in the way that, in other cinemas, it wasn’t.
AG – And how did your writing of ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ come about?
LM – At that point, Peter and I were living in the United States with our son, Chad. Peter had got his first university job at Northwestern, so I wasn’t doing anything very much and I didn’t find writing easy. I’d written an essay criticising the British pop artist Allen Jones, which had come out in Spare Rib, and Peter had been invited to give a talk by the French Department at the University of Wisconsin, and, because they were embarrassed not to ask me, despite the fact I had no academic standing whatsoever, they said, “Laura, would you like to give a paper of some kind?” So that was the first draft, the first few paragraphs, but that started it off and I think it’s the only time, or one of the few times, I’ve written something truly spontaneously.
AG – Could you talk a little more about this phobia of writing?
LM – I had a lack of self-confidence at university, definitely. I sometimes felt that it was because I couldn’t get any personal grasp on the ideas that I was trying to deal with and that it wasn’t really until I encountered feminism that I had my own sense of an angle, an axe to grind, as it were – something to say. And what made it even more liberating, perhaps, was that it wasn’t me; it was collective. It came out of a kind of wave, a movement, an energy, that wasn’t necessarily personal. So there wasn’t that sense of putting yourself on paper. It was more speaking about something much wider and more general than you yourself.
AG – And then it was also in America that you had the idea of making your first film, Penthesilea. How did you start thinking about the physical act of making a film, rather than just being an observer, albeit a critical one?
LM – A lot of it was to do with chance, as the department that Peter was working in was a film production department, as well as a film theory department. Peter said to his boss that he’d like to teach a course on the avant-garde and his boss was very shocked, because their collective love of cinema was really based around Hollywood. So, one day, his boss said to him, “Well, if you and Laura are so interested in the avant-garde these days, why don’t you make a film?” And that’s how it all started.
AG – How did the idea for Penthesilea come about?
LM – Well, I think, probably, the important thing to emphasise at this point is that, when we decided we would move into making films, we didn’t want to take a sudden leap away from our preoccupation with the everyday and the ideas that interested us and that we talked about. Rather, we wanted to use the film to deepen, widen and explore those ideas and think about the way in which they could possibly be transferred to the screen. Nowadays, it’d be called an ‘essay film’, but we thought of our films as theory films because that was the kind of work we thought we were doing in writing, and it was a way of extending our writing into a different medium. But, also, we were using what we thought of as a negative aesthetic, return to zero, scorched earth: standing back from so many of the conventions of cinema that underpin narrative convention, visual convention, point of view, and so on. Our strategy for this was to avoid editing. We were shooting with continuous, elongated shots using a whole reel of film as a unit. The ideas came very directly out of questions posed by feminist psychoanalytic theory, influenced, implicitly, by Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva: their various challenges to the Freudian and Lacanian concept of the Oedipus Complex and where the mother stood in it. So, in many ways, we were using Greek mythology as a way of reflecting on the place of the mother as outside the Lacanian Symbolic. So, I think language, and women’s relationship to language, was probably the central idea running through the film, and we were using the Amazons as a kind of iconic image, to work it through and to throw all kind of bits of culture together at the same time.
AG – Your second film, Riddles of the Sphinx, got funding from the BFI. Do you remember whether they were at all resistant to funding such an experimental film?
LM – Yes, I heard from a friend who was on the financing board that it had been a big struggle, but, at that time, by 1975, there really wasn’t an independent film movement in this country and so there was all this momentum building up in the arts in general: journals, writing, film festivals, seasons at the film theatre, symposia, discussions… So, although it was difficult to get Riddles through the board, there was a much greater openness and much greater possibilities for funding this kind of film than there’d ever been before.
AG – In the first part of Riddles, you appear and give a little history lesson, as it were, about the sphinx. Can you explain how the transparency of the ‘author’ was important to your filmmaking project?
LM – Peter had done it in a previous film. He’d given quite a long and elaborate lecture: much more elaborate than the one I give in Riddles. It was part of our aesthetic strategy of hybridity that a director should appear and speak directly to the camera. It was part of how we took the film out of its own moment of time and into the world of direct address. I’m sure I was quite reluctant, but there was no choice: it was my turn and it was part of the way we made films. They did have some difficulty filming me because I had a tendency to get the giggles or forget my words.
AG – Could you tell me about the 360-degree camera pan that runs through Riddles? I’m wondering if it was inspired by Chantal Akerman’s La Chambre (1972): I know you programmed some of her films at the Women’s Film Festival in Edinburgh, the year it came out.
LM – Well, yes, La Chambre had been made before Riddles, and there’d been an international season of avant-garde films at the National Film Theatre that was programmed by Simon Field and David Curtis, which had shown lots of amazing films. For me and Peter, it was the first time we’d seen films by Chantal Akerman, and also Yvonne Rainer and Joyce Wieland. There was suddenly a sense that women were making a notable contribution to new avant-garde aesthetics and always with a way of approaching filmic language that couldn’t necessarily have been made by anyone but a woman. The 360-degree pans weren’t influenced by anyone in particular, but by our old love of complicated camera movements. There were only a few 360-degree pans in the history of cinema and we were very aware of this. But, also, the 360-degree pans were very useful because the circular camera movement finished itself and excluded any questions of editing. Later, we thought of its elegant resonance with an idea of femininity theorised by Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray: the circular, the cyclical, claustrophobia, domestic space; comfort, something womb-like… I think, at first, we were thinking more cinematically, and then the cultural resonances struck us.
My shift in spectatorship came very suddenly and specifically out of the influence of the women’s movement, so that I was suddenly watching films that I’d loved and films that had moved me with different eyes
AG – The constant 360-degree pan doesn’t allow for a fixed gaze. Would it be too simplistic a reading to draw a line between this and your declamation of a fixed male gaze in ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, and to say that your writing had, maybe even without you realising, informed your filmmaking?
LM – I think definitely there was that sense of resisting a grounded gaze: an identifiable point of view. That was something we were deeply committed to, both for avant-garde and for feminist strategy.
AG – And because your and Peter’s filmmaking had successfully translated your theoretical writings, did you ever think that a counter-cinema would take over from Hollywood in the future, or were you still aware that the latter would dominate?
LM – At the time, we felt very strongly that Hollywood was finished. If you’d asked me at the time of the women’s film event at Edinburgh in 1972, I would have said that Hollywood would continue to make films, but that it would no longer have the power – either cinematic or industrial – that it had possessed before.
AG – And what did you select for the Women’s Film Event in Edinburgh?
LM – We wanted the programme to capture something of what we would have called the subversive tendencies of a woman’s cinema, so, for instance, Vera Chytilová’s Daisies was the kind of film we would have valued a lot; Nelly Kaplan’s La Fiancée du Pirate; Maya Deren’s work. One of the great successes of the event was finding Dorothy Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance: discovering there had been one woman working in Hollywood and finding a film with such subversive energy.
AG – Your concern with bringing together women artists from different backgrounds and finding similarities, rather than differences, is also apparent in your and Peter’s film on Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti. How did this project come about?
LM – Perhaps in the first instance because we were interested in discovering an avant-garde of the twenties that was very different to the Soviet one. Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti [1984] was almost a record of the argument of the exhibition of the two artists that we’d put on at the Whitechapel Gallery. The idea was to amplify the work of two women artists who were very different: one a painter, one a photographer, with very different attitudes to Modernism, but who had both been working in Mexico at around the same time, with similar influences and political positions. We made the film, I think, to try and grasp the idea of what our curating strategies were. The problem with the film, to my mind – and, actually, I think Peter thought this as much as I did – was that we didn’t get the voiceover right. The film was made by the Arts Council as part of its educational strand and we felt very strongly that the film could’ve stood by itself with a much more dispersed, broken-up soundtrack, in a more experimental world, but if it was going to go out as an educational object it needed a voiceover and I don’t think we broke it down enough – it’s just too flat. It doesn’t have enough fracturing, it’s not sufficiently hybrid. The problem was, maybe, that it was very much based on the essays that he and I had written for the catalogue and so it suffered from the fact that, if you’ve written something on a topic, it’s very difficult not to recycle it. But, if I’m to be honest, I would also acknowledge the fact that that exhibition was one of the most influential things that Peter and I did, because it put Frida Kahlo back on the map. In the twenties and thirties, she had been very well known, but mostly as Diego Rivera’s wife, whereas now, of course, she puts him in the shade in terms of celebrity culture.But, you know, artists drop out of sight and we weren’t the only people interested in her at the time. It was a moment for revival of interest in the Mexican renaissance and, as they say, it was ‘in the air’.
AG – Your and Peter’s filmmaking collaboration came to an end in ’84. Looking back, do you think it was a cultural and political moment that had allowed production and that had come to an end?
LM – The movement that we’d belonged to, that had really flourished in the late seventies, to a certain extent had broken up and there wasn’t quite such an environment for it. We were almost overwhelmed by the fact that, within such a short period of time, the political and cultural atmosphere had transformed into one of disorientation. Retrospectively, I could say that it was a kind of despair, but that would have been thought of as a bit reactionary at the time. But, for me and Peter, there was no longer this sense of a utopian vision: the sense that this was a cinema that was going to change the world and that we could change one’s way of seeing through the medium of film.
AG – In retrospect, do you think your filmic collaboration was balanced? How did you ensure this?
LM – Yes, it was very equal and that came out of an enormous amount of discussion, reading, research, and reworking. I was looking through our old notebooks recently and you can see the ideas were worked through over and over again: both intellectually and cinematically. But there were also divisions of labour, in that Peter was much more of a writer than I was – an essayist, poet, journalist. When I saw our films again at our retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery last year, I was so struck by the importance of Peter’s writing and what an important part of the films it was. When we went on to make The Bad Sister [1983] for Channel 4, there was a much bigger budget and it was a more conventional narrative. It was much harder for us to work together because, before, we’d always had such a clearly worked out strategy, that – this sounds a little pretentious, I know – it was like what Hitchcock said: “Why should I look through the camera only to tell my cameraman he’s lying to me?” You know, we knew what we wanted when we started the film and the film was planned to such an extent that there wasn’t a lot of discussion about editing. But, with The Bad Sister, it was different and that’s when we felt as though the collaboration was no longer going to work. This was, in part, due to the new world of video and experimental music video and a new non-celluloid world that was growing up in the early eighties, and the main source of financing was now Channel 4.
AG – Do you feel as though the position of the spectator has changed since you started making films?
LM – Yes, in the old avant-garde days, we would have felt that it was the responsibility of the director both to engage the spectator’s interest and to find a way of making the spectator active. I think that we would have felt that the onus was on the aesthetic experimental strategy of the film to create a certain kind of spectatorship. But now that people watch films in so many different ways, I feel as though it’s turned upside down and, now, the onus is on the spectator to be an active spectator and to engage imaginatively and poetically with any kind of film. For example, I found that, during the nineties, I was going back to my favourite old Hollywood films and looking at them again, but in a very different kind of way.
AG – And 2015 was the 40th anniversary of ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. Do you find yourself engaging with it differently?
LM – Yes, I really had to come to terms with it again a couple of years ago, and I found that I was more interested in it as a polemical essay or, as my friend [the academic] Mandy Merck called it, a manifesto, rather than the actual accuracy, or lack of accuracy, of what it says. And, like manifestos or polemics, it’s very much a one- or two-idea piece and that, I think, is its power. I see now that I managed to come up with some good turns of phrase that caught the public imagination, that have been re-quoted and recycled in all kinds of ways. I also feel that the Hitchcock side of it has become overemphasised and the Sternberg side of it – which is a bit more complicated and less easy to generalise – has got a bit lost. I’m thinking of going back to that and expanding upon the fetishisitic, rather than voyeuristic, side. But then, at the same time, I think that the essay was influential for me when I was thinking about the ideas that ended up in [my 2006 publication] Death 24x a Second: that interest in stillness and the idea that the pensive spectator is, to some extent, grounded in the voyeuristic spectator of ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. And also the idea that the spectacle of the female protagonist on display actually stops and holds the film, and that the voyeuristic gaze is a gaze at stillness rather than at movement, so, even if there’s a dance or a song, it’s actually a moment of suspension in the normal narrative chain and flow of an action film. So, although when I was writing about the pensive spectator, its ideological implication was very different, at the same time I think that question of the male gaze – the voyeuristic gaze and how the cinematic gaze can actually be transformed and rethought – has some kind of connection. In terms of the essay, I was working very much within the confines offered by the Hollywood films. In the years since, I’ve thought of questions of race and the invisibility of African American performers and talent in Hollywood and how it was really an apartheid cinema.
AG – And, finally, what advice would you give to your young self if you could now?
LM – Think small. Think in terms of the everyday, and move out from there.
