Film
Riddles of the Sphinx
- Director
- Laura Mulvey, Peter Wollen
- Certificate
- U
- Running Time
- 97 mins
Made with fellow academic Peter Wollen, feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey‘s BFI-produced 1977 experimental film addresses the position of women in patriarchy through the prism of psychoanalysis. It’s constructed in three sections and 13 chapters, “combining Mulvey’s own to-camera readings around the myth of Oedipus’s encounter with the Sphinx with a series of very slow 360 degree panning shots encompassing different environments, from the domestic to the professional. Louise, the narrative’s female protagonist, is represented through a fragmented use of imagery and dialogue, in an attempt to break down the conventional narrative structures of framing and filming used to objectify and fetishise women in mainstream cinema.”
The Watershed’s screening is part of the Revolt, She Said season focused on women and film post-’68. It’s followed by a Q&A hosted by So Mayer (Club des Femmes), academic and curator Kim Knowles, photographer and filmmaker Esther May Campbell and journalist and programmer Lorena Pino.
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