Laura Mulvey

Laura Mulvey, July 2010

Laura Mulvey (born August 15, 1941 ) is a British feminist film theorist . She currently holds the chair of film and media studies at Birkbeck College of the University of London held.

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Mulvey became known in 1975 with her psychoanalytic approach to interpretation of early Hollywood - movies . With her best-known article Visuelle Lust und Narrative Kino , she introduced a theoretical turning point in feminist film analysis of the 1970s. She thus became the leading figure of a new movement that tried to highlight and criticize the prevailing patriarchal structures and the associated image of women in film .

Her analysis is based on Freud's psychoanalysis and Jacques Lacan's conception of the mirror stage . Mulvey's radical feminist criticism of Hollywood films, especially in the 1980s, increasingly contradicted theories of gender studies , according to which queer subcultures can also make completely different uses of mainstream products, as well as the increasingly influential texts of the Cultural studies , which also emphasized the consumer's scope for interpretation and appropriation.

Mulvey corrected earlier positions himself and today examines film along a historical analysis of the cinematic categories of stagnation and movement or death and life.

She also pursued her film criticism artistically. In films such as Riddles of the Sphinx (1977, together with her husband Peter Wollen ), she tries to avoid all the pitfalls of a (the woman's body) fetishizing film look.

Works

• Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema , in: Bill Nichols (ed.): Movies and Methods. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985. Ger .: Visual pleasure and narrative cinema . In: Liliane Weissberg (ed.): Femininity as a masquerade. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994, pp. 48-65
• A look from the present into the past: A re-vision of the feminist film theory of the 1970s. Translated by Katja Widerspahn and Susanne Lummerding. In: Monika Bernhold, Andrea Braidt, Claudia Preschl (eds.): Screenwise. Movie-television feminism. Marburg: Schüren Vlg. 2004, pp. 17-27
• Afterthoughts on "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" inspired by King Vidor's "Duel in the Sun". In: Framework , 15-16-17, 1981, pp. 12-15.
• Death 24x a Second. Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaction Books, 2006

Web links

Commons : Laura Mulvey  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

• Reading Guide to Mulvey on Cinema and Psychoanalysis