Laura Mulvey at Yale

Event time: 
Thursday, April 30, 2015 - 5:00pm
Friday, May 1, 2015 - 7:00pm
Location: 
WHC Whitney Humanities Center, Rm 208 See map
Event description: 

LAURA  MULVEY at Yale!

We are very happy to welcome Laura Mulvey (author of the groundbreaking essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” and the recent book Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image) to Yale University for two events: 

April 30: ”Becoming  History: Spectatorship, Technology and Feminist Film Theory”

Thursday, April 30, 5:00 PM, Whitney Humanities Center Main Auditorium

Electronic and then digital technology had given the spectator a new freedom to intervene in the flow of film. These technological changes demand we re-consider gendered spectatorship and cinematic time. Professor Mulvey’s talk will re-evaluate the feminist polemic of ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’—which celebrates its fortieth anniversary in 2015—in light of radically changed conditions.

May 1: Riddles of the Sphinx (1977, Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen)

7:00 PM, Whitney Humanities Center Main Auditorium.
91 minutes; BluRay. Introduction and post-screening discussion with Laura Mulvey.

An exploration of the feminist aesthetics suggested by Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure” essay, Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) is one of the most important avant-garde and feminist films of the 1970s. Featuring a pioneering electronic score by The Soft Machine’s Mike Ratledge, and presented on a high-definition BluRay newly remastered by the BFI, Riddles of the Sphinx is by turns rigorous and playful, fierce and voluptuous, uncompromising and visually lush. 

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Laura Mulvey, moderated by Mal Ahern (Film and Media Studies / History of Art, Yale University).

This lecture and screening is generously sponsored by The Reni Celeste Memorial Fund, the Program in Film and Media Studies, the Department of History of Art, the Dean’s Fund for Student Symposia, the Yale School of Art, the Theory and Media Studies Colloquium, the Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, the Whitney Humanities Center, and Films at the Whitney supported by the Barbakow Fund for Innovative Film Programs at Yale.