Riddles of the Sphinx

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Riddles of the Sphinx
Directed by Laura Mulvey
Peter Wollen
Written byLaura Mulvey
Peter Wollen
Produced byLaura Mulvey
Peter Wollen
StarringDinah Stabb
Merdelle Jordine
Riannon Tise
CinematographyDiane Tammes
Edited byCarola Klein
Larry Sider
Music by Mike Ratledge
Production
company
Distributed by British Film Institute
Release date
  • 1977 (1977)
Running time
92 minutes
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish

Riddles of the Sphinx is a 1977 British experimental drama film written, directed and produced by Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen and starring Dinah Stabb, Merdelle Jordine and Riannon Tise.

Contents

Plot

The film consists of seven parts. The majority of the film focuses on part four which consists of 13 scenes, which are shot in long, continuous 360-degree pans of middle-class spaces occupied and encountered by the main character, Louise. Louise is dealing with a change in her lifestyle in which she must learn to negotiate domestic life and motherhood. This is occasionally interrupted by sequences of Mulvey talking to the camera, recounting the myth of Oedipus encountering the Sphinx.

Cast

Background

A feminist experimental film, Riddles of the Sphinx was partly inspired by Mulvey's work on feminist film theory of scopophilia and the male gaze, particularly her influential 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. [1] As she wrote that classical Hollywood cinema favoured the male spectator and his desire to gaze at women, Mulvey and Wollen's film is "an attempt to merge modernist forms with a narrative exploring feminism and psychoanalytical theory". [2] At the time, much of British experimental and avant-garde film was anti-narrative, and so the film is part of a movement that set out to explore and create a feminist language for cinema outside of traditional narrative norms. [3]

In her writing on feminist film theory, Mulvey has argued that, if the dominant cinema produces pleasure through scopophilia which favours the male gaze and festishization of woman as object, then alternative versions of cinema need to construct different forms of pleasure based on psychic relations that adopt a feminist perspective. [4] As such, the lack of exposition, concentration on the gender politics of domestic life, and the 360-degree pans which move slowly and without focus on the women characters in Riddles of the Sphinx, represent the antithesis of the cinematic pleasure seen in the dominant cinematic styles of the time. Frequently, a woman's voice is heard but not identifiable as particular character, further emphasizing "the lost discourse of woman's unconscious". [5] Rather than using a conventional voice-over, a multitude of voices are heard, Louise and her various friends and co-workers, which according to Mulvey is intended to as "a constant return to woman, not indeed as a visual image, but as a subject of inquiry, a content which cannot be considered within the aesthetic lines laid down by traditional cinematic practice." [6]

Critical reception

The BFI comments, "visually accomplished and intellectually rigorous Riddles of the Sphinx is one of the most important avant-garde films to have emerged from Britain during the 1970s". [7]

According to Maggie Humm in Feminism and Film, "Althusser's theory (the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA)) helped Mulvey clarify the systematic mechanisms by which cinematic desires might function, mechanisms which she tried to deconstruct with Brechtian techniques in her own films, particularly Riddles of the Sphinx." [8]

Patricia Erens in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism notes that Riddles of the Sphinx attempts to exhume a female voice that has been repressed by patriarchy, but which has nevertheless remained intact for thousands of years at some unconscious level." [9]

Related Research Articles

Feminist film theory is a theoretical film criticism derived from feminist politics and feminist theory influenced by second-wave feminism and brought about around the 1970s in the United States. With the advancements in film throughout the years feminist film theory has developed and changed to analyse the current ways of film and also go back to analyse films past. Feminists have many approaches to cinema analysis, regarding the film elements analyzed and their theoretical underpinnings.

Film theory is a set of scholarly approaches within the academic discipline of film or cinema studies that began in the 1920s by questioning the formal essential attributes of motion pictures; and that now provides conceptual frameworks for understanding film's relationship to reality, the other arts, individual viewers, and society at large. Film theory is not to be confused with general film criticism, or film history, though these three disciplines interrelate.

Psychoanalytic film theory is a school of academic thought that evokes the concepts of psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. The theory is closely tied to Critical theory, Marxist film theory, and Apparatus theory. The theory is separated into two waves. The first wave occurred in the 1960s and 70s. The second wave became popular in the 1980s and 90s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laura Mulvey</span> British feminist film theorist

Laura Mulvey is a British feminist film theorist and filmmaker. She was educated at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She is currently professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She previously taught at Bulmershe College, the London College of Printing, the University of East Anglia, and the British Film Institute.

In psychology and psychiatry, scopophilia or scoptophilia is an aesthetic pleasure drawn from looking at an object or a person. In human sexuality, the term scoptophilia describes the sexual pleasure that a person derives from looking at prurient objects of eroticism, such as pornography, the nude body, and fetishes, as a substitute for actual participation in a sexual relationship.

Feminist theory is the extension of feminism into theoretical, fictional, or philosophical discourse. It aims to understand the nature of gender inequality. It examines women's and men's social roles, experiences, interests, chores, and feminist politics in a variety of fields, such as anthropology and sociology, communication, media studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, home economics, literature, education, and philosophy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Experimental film</span> Cinematic works that are experimental form or content

Experimental film or avant-garde cinema is a mode of filmmaking that rigorously re-evaluates cinematic conventions and explores non-narrative forms or alternatives to traditional narratives or methods of working. Many experimental films, particularly early ones, relate to arts in other disciplines: painting, dance, literature and poetry, or arise from research and development of new technical resources.

Apparatus theory, derived in part from Marxist film theory, semiotics, and psychoanalysis, was a dominant theory within cinema studies during the 1970s, following the 1960s when psychoanalytical theories for film were popular.

Peter Wollen was a film theorist and filmmaker. He studied English at Christ Church, Oxford. Both political journalist and film theorist, Wollen's Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (1969) helped to transform the discipline of film studies by incorporating the methodology of structuralism and semiotics. He taught film at a number of universities and was Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles at the time of his retirement from academe in 2005.

<i>The Seashell and the Clergyman</i> 1928 experimental French film

The Seashell and the Clergyman is a 1928 French experimental film directed by Germaine Dulac, from an original scenario by Antonin Artaud. It premiered in Paris on 9 February 1928. The film is associated with French Surrealism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Griselda Pollock</span>

Griselda Frances Sinclair Pollock is an art historian and cultural analyst of international, postcolonial feminist studies in visual arts and visual culture. Since 1977, Pollock has been an influential scholar of modern art, avant-garde art, postmodern art, and contemporary art. She is a major influence in feminist theory, feminist art history, and gender studies. She is renowned for her innovative feminist approaches to art history which aim to deconstruct the lack of appreciation and importance of women in art as other than objects for the male gaze.

Mary Ann Doane is the Class of 1937 Professor of Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley and was previously the George Hazard Crooker Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She is a pioneer in the study of gender in film.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gaze</span> Awareness and perception of others

In critical theory, philosophy, sociology, and psychoanalysis, the gaze, in the figurative sense, is an individual's awareness and perception of other individuals, other groups, or oneself. The concept and the social applications of the gaze have been defined and explained by existentialist and phenomenologist philosophers. Jean-Paul Sartre described the gaze in Being and Nothingness (1943). Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), developed the concept of the gaze to illustrate the dynamics of socio-political power relations and the social dynamics of society's mechanisms of discipline. Jacques Derrida, in The Animal That Therefore I Am (1997), elaborated upon the inter-species relations that exist among human beings and other animals, which are established by way of the gaze.

Afterall is a nonprofit contemporary art research and publishing organisation. It is based in London, at Central Saint Martins. It publishes the journal Afterall; the book series Readers,One Works and Exhibition Histories.

Denys George Irving, was a Welsh filmmaker and musician from Colwyn Bay, North Wales.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Male gaze</span> Concept in feminist theory

In feminist theory, the male gaze is the act of depicting women and the world in the visual arts and in literature from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer. In the visual and aesthetic presentations of narrative cinema, the male gaze has three perspectives: that of the man behind the camera, that of the male characters within the film's cinematic representations; and that of the spectator gazing at the image.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Women in film</span> Women involved in the film industry

Women are involved in the film industry in all roles, including as film directors, actresses, cinematographers, film producers, film critics, and other film industry professions, though women have been underrepresented in creative positions.

The female gaze is a feminist theory term referring to the gaze of the female spectator, character or director of an artistic work, but more than the gender it is an issue of representing women as subjects having agency. As such, people of any gender can create films with a female gaze. It is a response to feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey's term "the male gaze", which represents not only the gaze of a heterosexual or bisexual or pansexual male viewer but also the gaze of the male character and the male creator of the film. In that sense it is close, though different, from the Matrixial gaze coined in 1985 by Bracha L. Ettinger. In contemporary usage, the female gaze has been used to refer to the perspective a female filmmaker (screenwriter/director/producer) brings to a film that might be different from a male view of the subject.

The oppositional gaze is a term coined by bell hooks the 1992 essay The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators that refers to the power of looking. According to hooks, an oppositional gaze is a way that a Black person in a subordinate position communicates their status. hooks' essay is a work of feminist film theory that discusses the male gaze, Michel Foucault, and white feminism in film theory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Karola Gramann</span>

Karola Gramann is a German film scholar and film curator. From 2006 to 2019 she was artistic director of the Kinothek Asta Nielsen e.V.

References

  1. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (PDF). USC.edu. Retrieved 29 August 2014.
  2. O'Pray, Michael (1996). The British Avant-Garde Film 1926 to 1995. University of Luton Press. p.  16. ISBN   1860200044.
  3. George Melnyk; Brenda Austin-Smith (20 May 2010). The Gendered Screen: Canadian Women Filmmakers. Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. p. 68. ISBN   978-1-55458-195-5.
  4. Kuhn, Annette (1982). Women's Pictures: Feminism and Cinema. London: Verso. p. 163. ISBN   1-85984-910-5.
  5. Fischer, Lucy (Winter 1989). "Shot/Countershot: An intertextual Approach to Women's Cinema". Journal of Film and Video. XLI (4).
  6. "Riddles of the Sphinx (1977)". Screenonline.org.uk. Retrieved 29 August 2014.
  7. "Riddles of the Sphinx". BFI. Retrieved 1 August 2014.
  8. Maggie Humm (1997). Feminism and Film. Edinburgh University Press. pp. 19–. ISBN   978-0-7486-0900-0.
  9. Patricia Erens (1990). Issues in Feminist Film Criticism . Indiana University Press. pp.  315–. ISBN   0-253-20610-3.

Further reading