‘Riddles of the Sphinx - Laura Mulvey & Peter Wollen’

This film will be screened extra muros at Cinematek.​​​​​​​

​​​​​​​In the presence of the director Laura Mulvey.

Laura Mulvey is known for her concept of the male gaze that she developed in the 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. The film Riddles of the Sphinx by Mulvey and co-director Peter Wollen explores the position of women in patriarchal society. Consisting of three parts and 13 chapters, the film draws inspiration from psychoanalysis in its deconstruction of the conventional narrative structures used in traditional media. The visually accomplished and intellectually rigorous Riddles of the Sphinx is seen as one of the most important avant-garde films to have emerged from Britain during the 1970s.

The film’s ground-breaking electronic score, by Soft Machine’s Mike Ratledge, was composed on synthesisers which were developed in collaboration with Denys Irving (the man behind the mysterious and controversial 1970s band Lucifer).