Briton Laura Mulvey, 80, was at the Bordeaux International Independent Film Festival. Filmmaker, feminist activist and film theorist, she is notably the author of a short combative article, “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema”, published in 1975 in the British magazine Screen, included in his collection of articles Beyond visual pleasure. Feminism, puzzles, cinephilia (Mimesis, 2017), and which has become the touchstone of feminist theory on cinema.
She raises there, through a rereading of Freud and Lacan, the question of male gauze (the “male gaze”), postulating that classic Hollywood cinema is constructed in accordance with a male desire for domination which is the motor of the story, while the woman is reduced to the status of pure object. This thesis, which initially received little echo in French cinephilia, has aroused renewed interest in recent years, thanks to the #metoo movement.
Do you remember what triggered off your decision to write “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”?
Yes, very good. We were, in the 1960s, in London, a small band of left-wing moviegoers, followers of the Cinema notebooks, whose recommendations we followed and the rediscovery of American cinema. As much to say to you that it was a behavior which was not very British. The British don’t like American popular culture, neither do French theories.
So we were happy moviegoers, until the day I got closer to the Women’s Liberation Movement. My outlook on cinema suddenly changed. Suddenly, films that had made me cry, that I had adored, left me at a distance. I was thinking of the place of women on the screen, I had gone from an absorbed gaze to a reflective gaze. At the same time, I joined a feminist book club, where we read anything that had to do with the minorization of women. Freud was astonishing to me. All of this led to the writing of this article.
Nothing of the “absorbed” spectator that you were will have persisted in you?
Yes, of course. I still loved these films, somewhere, but politics and psychoanalysis had opened my eyes to them at the same time.
How was the text received at the time? Did it have an immediate impact?
No, it took a long time. Film studies did not yet exist in the UK. On the other hand, it sparked a debate within feminist movements, because some thinkers were violently against psychoanalysis, which they saw as a patriarchal science.
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