Laura Mulvey – short films
AMY!
‘Happy the land that needs no heroes’ Brecht once said. AMY!, the last part of Mulvey and Wollen’s loose trilogy, after Penthesilea and Riddles of the Sphinx, contemplates ways in which societies create heroines. The pioneering English aviatrix Amy Johnson gained fame in 1930 after her legendary solo flight from Britain to Australia and the film marks its 50th anniversary. Johnson’s persona is explored through the use of various fictional images, sounds and readings of her private letters. Set in the 1980s, the music by legendary punk formation Poly-Styrene and X-Ray Spex, marks the conceptual rather than historical nature of the film. The directors aimed at making ‘an anti-heroine film’, which explores Johnson’s struggle with celebrity status: ‘We want to enquire into the idea and image of the heroine […] by putting fragments on display to suggest both the frustrations from which heroism is born and to which it is condemned, and at the same time something of the exhilaration it provides for the heroine herself […].’ Thus the film is not so much about the heroine herself, as it is about the very idea of constructing heroes and their exploitation by the media and society.
Kamila Kuc
Laura Mulvey, Peter Wollen
Laura Mulvey
Born in Oxford in 1941, Laura Mulvey studied History at Oxford University. In 1975 she published ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, a highly influential psychoanalytic feminist polemic on the voyeuristic systems of spectatorship found in Hollywood film. Mulvey made six films with Peter Wollen that attempted to counteract these patriarchal structures including Riddles of The Sphinx (1977), Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (1982) and The Bad Sister (1983). She has written extensively on Sirk, Godard and Hitchcock, and remains a pre-eminent authority on film theory. Her recent book Death 24 Times a Second looks at the impact of new media technologies on shifting modes of film spectatorship. She is currently Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Peter Wollen
Born in London in 1938, Wollen studied English at Oxford University. His influential book Signs and Meanings in Cinema (1969) constitutes a reflection of his interests in semiotics, structuralism, Hollywood cinema, the Soviet avant-garde, the French New Wave. Wollen's essays 'The two avant-gardes' and 'Counter cinema' established him as a leading theorist of avant-garde film. He co-wrote The Passenger (Michaelangelo Antonioni, 1975). Between 1974 and 1983 he made six films with Laura Mulvey. His own feature, Friendship’s Death (1987) is a futuristic story set in Amman in September 1970, during the battles between Palestinian guerrillas and the Jordanian army. Wollen is Professor Emeritus of the Department of Film, Television and New Media at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Disgraced Monuments
‘Every turning point in our society has begun its new history in a struggle with old monuments’, says art critic Natalya Davidova. Filmed after the failed coup in the Soviet Union, Disgraced Monuments sees Mulvey collaborating with the Canadian photographer Mark Lewis in an attempt to answer the question ‘how can seventy years of Soviet history be told and represented in a post-Communist era?’ The archival footage from the 1920s, 30s and 40s merges with the present day interviews with artists and critics to suggest that this destruction of monuments creates a ‘reactionary nostalgia for the pre-Communist world.’ The film brings to mind Mikhail Yampolsky’s essay ‘In the Shadow of Monuments. Notes on Iconoclasm and Time’: ‘Destruction and construction can be understood […] as two equally valid procedures of immortalisation…A tradition has developed historically to build a new monument precisely on the site of the old one, as though accumulating in one place two commemorative gestures: vandalism and the erection of a new idol.’ Disgraced Monuments is about alienation that accompanies the transition from one political system to another.
Kamila Kuc
Laura Mulvey, Mark Lewis
Laura Mulvey
Born in Oxford in 1941, Laura Mulvey studied History at Oxford University. In 1975 she published ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, a highly influential psychoanalytic feminist polemic on the voyeuristic systems of spectatorship found in Hollywood film. Mulvey made six films with Peter Wollen that attempted to counteract these patriarchal structures including Riddles of The Sphinx (1977), Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (1982) and The Bad Sister (1983). She has written extensively on Sirk, Godard and Hitchcock, and remains a pre-eminent authority on film theory. Her recent book Death 24 Times a Second looks at the impact of new media technologies on shifting modes of film spectatorship. She is currently Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Mark Lewis
Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti
Diego Rivera’s 1929 mural that includes portraits of Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti serves as a starting point to a documentary about the lives and work of these two extraordinary female artists. Both women worked in Mexico in the aftermath of the Revolution, when Mexican culture underwent a cultural Renaissance. The film is divided into seven sections to mark differences between the two artists: ‘Each defined herself differently in the face of the necessities and accidents of history and biography and in relationship to her own body.’ What unites Kahlo’s paintings and Modotti’s photographs is the representation of women and their position in society. The film contains rare colour footage of Kahlo and Rivera in their ‘blue house’ in Coyoacan and Modotti starring in a Hollywood film The Tiger’s Coat (dir. Roy Clements, 1920). Mulvey and Wollen’s film reflects upon choices for women, as presented in opening and closing a commentary read by actress Myriam Margoyles: ‘Two choices for women. The personal, the traditional sphere of women, their suffering, their self-image. On the other hand the political: the renunciation of home and family to produce images dedicated to social change.’
Kamila Kuc
Laura Mulvey, Peter Wollen
Laura Mulvey
Born in Oxford in 1941, Laura Mulvey studied History at Oxford University. In 1975 she published ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, a highly influential psychoanalytic feminist polemic on the voyeuristic systems of spectatorship found in Hollywood film. Mulvey made six films with Peter Wollen that attempted to counteract these patriarchal structures including Riddles of The Sphinx (1977), Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (1982) and The Bad Sister (1983). She has written extensively on Sirk, Godard and Hitchcock, and remains a pre-eminent authority on film theory. Her recent book Death 24 Times a Second looks at the impact of new media technologies on shifting modes of film spectatorship. She is currently Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Peter Wollen
Born in London in 1938, Wollen studied English at Oxford University. His influential book Signs and Meanings in Cinema (1969) constitutes a reflection of his interests in semiotics, structuralism, Hollywood cinema, the Soviet avant-garde, the French New Wave. Wollen's essays 'The two avant-gardes' and 'Counter cinema' established him as a leading theorist of avant-garde film. He co-wrote The Passenger (Michaelangelo Antonioni, 1975). Between 1974 and 1983 he made six films with Laura Mulvey. His own feature, Friendship’s Death (1987) is a futuristic story set in Amman in September 1970, during the battles between Palestinian guerrillas and the Jordanian army. Wollen is Professor Emeritus of the Department of Film, Television and New Media at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Untitled (reworked footage of Marilyn Monroe; taken from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes; 3 minutes)
In her recent book, Death 24x a Second, Mulvey recognises the impact of home viewing technology and its facilitation of a shift from voyeuristic to fetishistic spectatorship. In her self-manipulated extract of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) Mulvey brings to life this transferral of power as immobile audiences move from darkened rooms into interactive, remote-controlled environments. Consisting of a short, slowed-down and repeated extract from Hawks’ celebrated film, Mulvey captures and repeats Monroe’s evocative dance moves from the film’s opening performance of ‘Two Little Girls from Little Rock’, both celebrating and immortalising the actress’s iconic capacity for expressive gesture, while foregrounding her mask-like face and glittering body in slow-motion re-edits that reference the cinephilic fascination with Hollywood that is seen in the video art of Martin Arnold (Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy, 1998) and Douglas Gordon (24 Hour Psycho, 1993). As Monroe dances in delayed, repetitious reverie she appears caught between life in the image and death outside the screen, captured in a recurring moment of eternal image fascination.
Lara Thompson
Laura Mulvey
Born in Oxford in 1941, Laura Mulvey studied History at Oxford University. In 1975 she published ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, a highly influential psychoanalytic feminist polemic on the voyeuristic systems of spectatorship found in Hollywood film. Mulvey made six films with Peter Wollen that attempted to counteract these patriarchal structures including Riddles of The Sphinx (1977), Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (1982) and The Bad Sister (1983). She has written extensively on Sirk, Godard and Hitchcock, and remains a pre-eminent authority on film theory. Her recent book Death 24 Times a Second looks at the impact of new media technologies on shifting modes of film spectatorship. She is currently Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London.