Laura Mulvey1971-1980ExperimentalPeter WollenUnited Kingdom

Laura Mulvey & Peter Wollen – Riddles of the Sphinx (1977)

Synopsis:
A complex treatise exploring feminism, motherhood and sexual difference in seven numbered chapters. Headings are: Opening Pages; Laura Talking; Stones; Louise’s Story Told in 13 Shots; Acrobats; Laura Listening; Puzzle ending.

Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s film (1977) addresses the position of women in patriarchy through the prism of psychoanalysis. Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) draws on the critical writings and investigations by both filmmakers into the codes of narrative cinema, and offers an alternative formal structure through which to consider the images and meanings of female representation in film.

The film is constructed in three sections, 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. This could be seen as a formal development of the Lacanian analyses that Mulvey had applied to the female image in film in essays such as 1975’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (in Screen).

Riddles of the Sphinx attempts to construct a new relationship between the viewer and the female subject, presenting her through multiple female voices and viewpoints. The dialogue, constructed from the different voices of Louise, her friends and fellow workers, brings a shifting and ambiguous range of meanings to the film, in contrast to the explanatory authority associated with a conventional voice-over. Other voices and images from outside the film’s narrative world also question and disrupt pre-supposed meanings and symbols of the woman within and without the screen; from the mythical enigma of the Sphinx to the appearances of artist Mary Kelly and Mulvey herself.
As Mulvey herself subsequently put it, “What recurs overall is 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.”



Riddles of the Sphinx.mkv

General
Container: Matroska
Runtime: 1h 30mn
Size: 3.74 GiB
Video
Codec: x264
Resolution: 960x720
Aspect ratio: 4:3
Frame rate: 24.000 fps
Bit rate: 5 000 Kbps
BPP: 0.301
Audio
#1: AC-3 @ 448 Kbps
#2: AC-3 @ 448 Kbps (Commentary by Laura Mulvey & Winfried Pauleit)

https://nitro.download/view/90CE2EE409C0C40/Riddles_of_the_Sphinx.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English (soft subs)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Back to top button