Riddles of the Sphinx

Riddles of the Sphinx is a 1977 film written and directed by Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen and starring Dinah Stabb, Merdelle Jordine and Riannon Tise. It was produced by the British Film Institute. The electronic score is from Mike Ratledge of Soft Machine.

Riddles of the Sphinx
Directed byLaura Mulvey
Peter Wollen
Written byLaura Mulvey
Peter Wollen
StarringDinah Stabb, Merdelle Jordine and Riannon Tise
Music byMike Ratledge
Production
company
Running time
92 minutes
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish

Background

A feminist experimental film, Riddles of the Sphinx was partly inspired by Mulvey's work on feminist film theory of scopophilia and the male gaze, particularly her influential 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.[1] As she wrote that classical Hollywood cinema favoured the male spectator and his desire to gaze at women, Mulvey and Wollen's film is "an attempt to merge modernist forms with a narrative exploring feminism and psychoanalytical theory".[2] At the time, much of British experimental and avant-garde film was anti-narrative, and so the film is part of a movement that set out to explore and create a feminist language for cinema outside of traditional narrative norms.[3]

In her writing on feminist film theory, Mulvey has argued that, if the dominant cinema produces pleasure through scopophilia which favours the male gaze and festishization of woman as object, then alternative versions of cinema need to construct different forms of pleasure based on psychic relations that adopt a feminist perspective.[4] As such, the lack of exposition, concentration on the gender politics of domestic life, and the 360-degree pans which move slowly and without focus on the women characters in Riddles of the Sphinx, represent the antithesis of the cinematic pleasure seen in the dominant cinematic styles of the time. Frequently, a woman's voice is heard but not identifiable as particular character, further emphasizing "the lost discourse of woman's unconscious".[5] Rather than using a conventional voice-over, a multitude of voices are heard, Louise and her various friends and co-workers, which according to Mulvey is intended to as "a constant return to woman, not indeed as a visual image, but as a subject of inquiry, a content which cannot be considered within the aesthetic lines laid down by traditional cinematic practice."[6]

Plot

The film consists of 13 scenes, the majority of which are shot in long, continuous 360-degree pans of middle-class spaces occupied and encountered by the main character, Louise. Louise is dealing with a change in her lifestyle in which she must learn to negotiate domestic life and motherhood. This is occasionally interrupted by sequences of Mulvey talking to the camera, recounting the myth of Oedipus encountering the Sphinx.

Cast
  • Dinah Stabb as Louise
  • Merdelle Jordine as Maxine
  • Riannon Tise as Anna
  • Clive Merrison as Chris
  • Marie Green as Acrobat
  • Paula Melbourne as Rope Act
  • Crisse Trigger as Juggler
  • Mary Maddox as Voice Off (voice)
  • Laura Mulvey as Herself / Voice Off

Critical reception

The BFI comments, "visually accomplished and intellectually rigorous Riddles of the Sphinx is one of the most important avant-garde films to have emerged from Britain during the 1970s".[7]

According to Maggie Humm in Feminism and Film, "Althusser's theory (the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA)) helped Mulvey clarify the systematic mechanisms by which cinematic desires might function, mechanisms which she tried to deconstruct with Brechtian techniques in her own films, particularly Riddles of the Sphinx."[8]

Patricia Erens in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism notes that Riddles of the Sphinx attempts to exhume a female voice that has been repressed by patriarchy, but which has nevertheless remained intact for thousands of years at some unconscious level."[9]

References
  1. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (PDF). USC.edu. Retrieved 29 August 2014.
  2. O'Pray, Michael (1996). The British Avant-Garde Film 1926 to 1995. University of Luton Press. p. 16. ISBN 1860200044.
  3. George Melnyk; Brenda Austin-Smith (20 May 2010). The Gendered Screen: Canadian Women Filmmakers. Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. p. 68. ISBN 978-1-55458-195-5.
  4. Kuhn, Annette (1982). Women's Pictures: Feminism and Cinema. London: Verso. p. 163. ISBN 1 85984 910 5.
  5. Fischer, Lucy (Winter 1989). "Shot/Countershot: An intertextual Approach to Women's Cinema". Journal of Film and Video. XLI (4).
  6. "Riddles of the Sphinx (1977)". Screenonline.org.uk. Retrieved 29 August 2014.
  7. "Riddles of the Sphinx". BFI. Retrieved 1 August 2014.
  8. Maggie Humm (1997). Feminism and Film. Edinburgh University Press. pp. 19–. ISBN 978-0-7486-0900-0.
  9. Patricia Erens (1990). Issues in Feminist Film Criticism. Indiana University Press. pp. 315–. ISBN 0-253-20610-3.

Further reading
  • Laura Mulvey (1975). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen 16:3. Online version.
  • E. Ann Kaplan (1979). Avant-Garde Feminist Cinema: Mulvey and Wollen's Riddles of the Sphinx. Quarterly Review of Film Studies IV:2.
  • Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (1977). Riddles of the Sphinx. Sight and Sound XLVI:3.
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