[spectre] New podcast: Laura Mulvey updates her key text "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"

[Radio Web MACBA]

*New podcast:* Laura Mulvey
<http://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/laura-mulvey/capsula> contextualises,
updates, and elucidates on the far-reaching impact of her key text "Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", where she coined the notion of the “male
gaze” in classic Hollywood cinema and addressed the power asymmetry in
representation and assigned gender roles, thus emphasising the patriarchal
ideological agenda of the American film industry. At the same time, she
opens up the debate with the notions of the “queer gaze” and the “universal
whiteness” of Hollywood. Mulvey also defends orality as a form of "history
from below", citing the example of “compilation films” (films that use
archival footage re-written with new narrative) as a space for a new
feminist film practice.

Link: http://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/laura-mulvey/capsula

Deeply involved in second wave feminism, in 1975 Laura Mulvey published the
essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, widely considered a seminal
feminist film theory text. Conceived as a manifesto – as Mulvey explains in
this conversation – her provocative essay applied psychoanalytic theory to
the imaginary produced by the cinematic apparatus of classical Hollywood
cinema from the thirties to the sixties, in which the man is the bearer of
the look, and the woman is the image. Mulvey advocated a political reading
of the psychoanalytic ideas and concepts (such as voyeurism, scopophilia,
fetishism, fear of castration...), transferring the binarisms proposed by
Freud to classical film narrative. In the text, Mulvey also coined the
notion of the “male gaze” to refer to the power asymmetry in representation
and assigned gender roles, thus emphasising the patriarchal ideological
agenda of the American film industry.

Laura Mulvey engages in film practice from all possible angles: as
filmmaker, screenwriter, essayist, critic, academic, and teacher. Through
her films – at first with Peter Wollen, later on her own –, her involvement
with the British Film Institute, and her academic work at Birkbeck College,
University of London, Mulvey has explored critical approaches to film
theory and its intersection with her interests in the semiotics of the
image, left-wing and feminist theory, and the possibilities of disrupting
linearity and temporality.

In this podcast, Laura Mulvey <https://mail.google.com/> contextualises,
updates, and elucidates on the far-reaching impact of this key text, which
she revised in later essays such as “Death 24 x a Second. Stillness and the
moving image”. At the same time, she opens up the debate with the notions
of the “queer gaze” and the “universal whiteness” of Hollywood. Mulvey also
defends orality as a form of "history from below", citing the example of
“compilation films” (films that use archival footage re-written with new
narrative) as a space for a new feminist film practice.


ENJOY!

+if you liked this podcast, you may be also interested in our conversation
with feminist activist and cult filmaker Lizzie Borden
<http://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/lizzie-borden-main/capsula>
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