Writer of the influential
Visual Pleasure and Narrative in the Cinema, and a key figure in
feminist theory, especially in the area of film, Laura Mulvey was born in
Oxford, England in 1941. She studied history at
St. Hilda's,
Oxford University, and became known to the circles of film theory in the early 1970's, writing articles for magazines like
Spare Rib and
Seven Days. Her ideas are often heavily
Marxist in nature.
In 1975, Mulvey published
Visual Pleasure and Narrative in the Cinema, an essay in which she uses
psychoanalysis to attack the
phallocentrism of popular cinema. In VPNC, Mulvey combines
Freudian theory and the writings of
Jacques Lacan with examples from
Alfred Hitchcock,
Josef von Sternberg, and others, to discuss the idea of woman as the object of the male gaze in cinema, and the passivity of females therein. For a more in-depth examination of this work, refer to the
writeup by
Indra363. Following criticisms of VPNC that Mulvey herself admitted were valid, she wrote "Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative in the Cinema' Inspired by King Vidor's
Duel in the Sun."
Between 1974 and 1982, Mulvey and her husband
Peter Wollen (currently chair of the film department at UCLA) wrote and directed six films,
Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons (1974),
Riddles of the Sphinx (1977),
AMY! (1980),
Crystal Gazing (1982),
Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (1982), and
The Bad Sister (1982). All six films explored aspects of feminism, most especially the idea of objectification of the feminine in cinema. They are intelligent and challenging, but tend to be rather ploddingly slow, suggestive of Mulvey's idea of the "Destruction of Pleasure."
In 1991, Mulvey produced and directed
Disgraced Monuments, a solo work dealing with the various fates of several pieces of
propaganda art from Communist Russia following the fall of
communism there.
Mulvey is presently a film professor at
Birkbeck College,
University of London.
sources:
http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/566978/
http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/472653/index.html
"Laura Mulvey." The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Vincent B. Leitch, ed. 2001. pp. 2179-81.
http://www.rlc.dcccd.edu/annex/comm/english/mah8420/EyesofLauraMulvey.htm