Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

Riddles of the Sphinx/Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti/Amy! (Tue., April 1, 7 p.m., free, International House, 3701 Chestnut St. ) In 1973, Laura Mulvey dropped her essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" on the unsuspecting world of film theory, and came as close to superstardom as any theoretician is likely to get. Positing the idea of a "male gaze," Mulvey argued that the structure of cinematic narrative was irretrievably corrupted by patriarchal voyeurism. The only way to forge a new feminist cinema was to tear down the old order.

Mulvey's article has been the subject of undergraduate film courses ever since, debated and critiqued ad infinitum. But Mulvey practiced what she preached. Riddles of the Sphinx, which opens a series of her films at I-House, is hardly a traditional narrative, and it does, as intended, deny the spectator all the pleasures of a classical film text. Co-directed with Mulvey's husband, Peter Wollen, the film begins with Mulvey, on camera, offering a feminist rereading of the story of Oedipus, focusing on the oft-overlooked role the sphinx's riddle plays in moving him toward his dire fate. She proposes the sphinx as a model for a narrator, one who questions rather than answers.

Riddles then moves into what appear to be a series of domestic tableaux, although when there is dialogue it is often muffled or distant, and the camera traces a course quite independently of the action. Through a series of ominous synthesizer drones, we hear a woman named Louise discussing the shortfalls of trade unionism as it regards child care, and further observations on the Oedipus complex. The short films that precede Riddles are more straightforward acts of history and criticism: Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti reads the lives and works of the artists through a feminist lens, and Amy! recounts the story of the first female aviator to make a solo flight from Great Britain to Australia.

Mulvey, who will introduce the screenings as part of a Penn Cinema Studies program on her work, has spent much of her career wrestling with the issues in her original essay, not least the problem that the feminist narrative she conceived is so self-marginalizing that its political effectiveness is circumscribed. Finding a new language that is still intelligible to speakers of the old one is a riddle that remains unsolved.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

A complete schedule of Mulvey's visit is available at cinemastudies.upenn.edu/events/index.html.