Laura Mulvey | Changes: thoughts across 40 years on feminism, film and spectatorship

Last year, 2015, saw the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Laura Mulvey’s essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ ( Screen 1995) which provides the starting point of this lecture. Its title, however, evokes her essay, written in the mid-1980s, ‘Changes: thoughts on myth, narrative and historical experience’ in which she first attempted to reflect on the ways in which changing political circumstances affected her theoretical perspectives and presumptions. In the mid 1990s, she was forced, once again, to question her ideas as technological change radically altered modes of film spectatorship, leading to her more recent work and her book Death Twenty-four Times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006). In this lecture she reflects on ‘changes’: ways in which variations in technologies, ideas and politics have affected her ideas.

Laura Mulvey is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of: Visual and Other Pleasures (Macmillan 1989; second edition 2009), Fetishism and Curiosity (British Film Institute 1996; second edition 2013), Citizen Kane (BFI Classics series 1992; second edition 2012) and Death Twenty- four Times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (Reaktion Books 2006). She made six films in collaboration with Peter Wollen including Riddles of the Sphinx (British Film Institute 1978; dvd publication 2013) and Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (Arts Council 1980). With artist/filmmaker Mark Lewis, she has made Disgraced Monuments (Channel 4 1994) and 23 August 2008 (2013).

In cooperation with mumok.

Laura Mulvey
Feminism and/in Cinema
the 20th and 21st of April 2016 at mumok