Knowra Laura Mulvey Laura Mulvey Laura Mulvey is a British feminist film theorist and filmmaker whose analysis of classical cinema’s male gaze reshaped debates about spectatorship, gender, and film form.
Male gaze : A way of looking that presents women as objects of masculine visual pleasure and positions viewers to adopt that perspective. Mulvey made this account of gendered looking central to her analysis of classical cinema.
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema : Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay arguing that classical narrative cinema organizes visual pleasure through gendered looking. This essay sets out the argument most closely associated with Mulvey.
Peter Wollen : A British film theorist, critic, and filmmaker whose work helped shape modern film studies. Wollen collaborated with Mulvey on films and shared her engagement with avant-garde film theory.
Black feminist film theory : Film criticism grounded in Black feminist thought, examining race, gender, representation, and spectatorship. It challenges accounts of spectatorship that treat gender as separable from race and racialized looking.
Riddles of the Sphinx : A 1977 experimental film by Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen that combines feminist themes with formal innovation. The film puts theoretical questions about women’s representation and cinematic form into practice.
Psychoanalytic film theory : An approach to cinema that uses psychoanalysis to explain spectatorship, identification, desire, and visual pleasure. Mulvey used psychoanalytic ideas to explain how film form structures looking and desire.
Feminist film theory : The study of how cinema represents gender and structures power, work, desire, and spectatorship. Mulvey’s intervention helped establish spectatorship and cinematic form as feminist questions.
Claire Johnston : A British feminist film critic whose writing challenged conventional representations of women in cinema. Johnston’s early feminist film criticism provided a close intellectual context for Mulvey’s intervention.
Oppositional gaze : A critical way of looking that resists dominant representations, developed by bell hooks in her analysis of Black women spectators. It disputes the idea that viewers simply occupy the positions classical cinema offers them.
Black Widow (1987 film) : A 1987 thriller directed by Bob Rafelson about a woman who marries and kills wealthy men. Its shifting attraction to and suspicion of a femme fatale invites analysis through Mulvey’s account of looking.
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