Tuesday 4 November, 2025: Laura Mulvey at BFI Southbank with guests, including: B. Ruby Rich, Joanna Hogg, Liz Karlsen, Stephen Woolley, Rebecca O’Brien, journalists Anna Smith and Hanna Flint & Berlinale Festival Director, Tricia Tuttle | Image credit: Tim Whitby (BFI)
How do you kick off celebrations in honour of Laura Mulvey - filmmaker, author, theorist and academic - the night she receives her BFI Fellowship? By gathering friends, colleagues, students and past collaborators for a photo call in the middle of the foyer at BFI Southbank, all proudly wearing her name across their chests.
It may be five decades since her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema redefined feminist film theory, but the influence of her word has never wavered; challenging conventions of cinema spectatorship, shaping filmmakers from Joanna Hogg to Céline Sciamma and surfacing in the most unexpected corners of pop culture - yes, even BoJack Horseman. In our conversation, she reflects on her legacy, the nuances often lost in the “male gaze” (a phrase she coined), the crises of contemporary masculinity and female filmmakers who inspire her today.
Laura Stratford: What was it like to see friends, colleagues and former students wearing shirts in honour of you on the night of your BFI Fellowship?
Laura Mulvey: It was a little bit surreal. I was absolutely thrilled to have my name there and celebrated; particularly this sense of a younger generation’s excitement, that means an enormous amount to me. On the other hand, paradoxically, in the early days of the Women’s Liberation Movement, we prioritised collectivity in the sense that there was a culture of not signing your name to things. For instance, there was a journal called Shrew that circulated across the groups and in those days, if you wrote a piece, you didn’t sign it - it came out collectively under the collective signature of your group. But, I mean, that was then. What I found so moving about the t-shirt on Tuesday was that it seemed to be celebrating a memory, a continuum, the way in which my name has persisted; and even if I don’t think of it so much as ‘me’, it’s a kind of symbol for the way in which feminist thought has made its way through dominant culture and it's there as a sign of change and I do hope, inspiration, as well. But, I do think I would ask you this question - that’s probably the case with all your t-shirts to a certain extent, no? You’re signalling people whose work is actually amongst more than the individual person.
Exactly, yes. Celebrating a collective of female voices working in the film industry.
Yes.
What’s the most common misreading of Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema?
The way I only used the third person masculine (‘he’ and ‘him) for the spectator and how this was a very polemical point to emphasise the way in which the masculine was used as it were, universally, for the neutral person and everybody; and also to emphasise the way that language of cinema did address just the masculine spectator.
Whether I feel that over the years the way in which the essay was built around psychoanalytic theory and Freud has got a little bit brushed to one side, I think that’s probably true, too - but I mean, to tell the honest truth, I think that the fact that the idea of the ‘male gaze’ has in a sense moved out of its original nest as it were and flown into and spread into popular culture is a really interesting phenomenon. So, to my mind, that’s a sign of the way in which gender issues have, once again, become really important for both young men and young women and as it were, beyond gender, today; and the kinds of norms are being re-thought; and it seems to me as well that the #MeToo movement emphasised the importance of politics that went on both sides of the camera.
Yes. I’m glad you’ve mentioned #MeToo… Have you ever heard of BoJack Horseman?
No.
It’s an American animated, tragicomedy series about a humanoid horse called BoJack, who’s also a depressed former TV sitcom star… I only mention it because whilst watching an episode last night, something surreal happened that I had to share. At one point, another character called Diane says to BoJack:
“I do wonder, as a third wave feminist, if it is even possible for women to reclaim their sexuality in this deeply entrenched patriarchal society or if claiming to do so is a lie we tell ourselves so we can more comfortably cater to the male gaze.”
Isn’t that interesting?
Right?! I was honestly surprised because I hadn’t seen this episode before and that’s the one that I chose randomly last night, the night before speaking to you, and it happens to be inspired by you. How does it feel to know your influence has spread across various mediums, various different kinds of art forms, such as animation, such as this show?
Isn’t that extraordinary? … Well, I suppose one way in which I would perhaps kind of modify the question of the male gaze a little bit from, going back to what my original thoughts were in the early 70s… I wasn’t really thinking so much of individual men or actual individual subjects, so much as the way a particular language of representation and a language of film addresses that spectator and creates them. So, this is perhaps something that’s a little bit more complicated in terms of theoretical understanding than just literally thinking about men whistling at women in the street, if you see what I mean.
One point that I think is very important to remember about the early days of feminist cultural activism is that representation was seen as a political issue. There were a couple of steps: the early Women’s liberation movement was founded on the fact that the female body was a site of exploitation and thus, a site of struggle; the struggle for reproductive rights, the struggle for control, one’s own sexuality, etcetera etcetera. But if you think of the female body as a site of struggle, then the image of the female body then becomes a site of struggle, and that’s a movement out of the actual everyday experience into culture, language, image, representation and so it does begin to demand a more theoretical approach, if you see what I mean. So, there’s a bit of a gap there.
Once the image becomes a site of struggle, the thought arises: if images of women are circulating in what we might call patriarchal, capitalist society - in the cinema, in ads, pin-ups - then this image doesn’t really represent women. It represents an image of woman that conforms to the fantasies and anxieties of the male unconscious that’s produced it.
So, I think I was trying to make quite a complicated, theoretical point and whether those nuances have got lost, the idea of the ‘male gaze’, I don’t know… But at the same time, I just think that, anyone who cares to stop and think about it can then also start to think about these other issues that are bound up with it, with what’s become the kind of catchphrase, as it were, and think it through in more depth.
Are there any other questions from your earlier writings that still feel urgent to you, today?
In those days we were struggling for women’s rights and we were concentrating very much on the problem of femininity under patriarchy. Now I feel that there’s a whole other world of masculinity in crisis and problems to do with confusions around male dominance and so on, which - I can’t really at my age begin to address but - seem to be becoming more and more urgent. So, rather than emphasising the politics of femininity, there’s also the politics of masculinity and this of course is becoming more of an issue with the rise of macho cults and in a way, it’s begun to infiltrate mainstream politics, as you see in the United States. To my mind, this demands another kind of psychoanalytic take on it because there seems to be some very deep unconscious insecurities that are behind these kinds of macho developments.
How do you think we should engage with this debate around masculinity?
It’s difficult because I still feel that psychoanalytic theory has a lot to offer, even if only in the simplest state sense of insisting there is an unconscious and the way that people’s behaviour in everyday life - especially when it becomes paranoically gendered - demands a sense that there is an unconscious there and how can that be analysed. So, if there was a return to or perhaps even reinvention of the tradition of psychoanalytic theory, or even a return to the way in which Freud understood masculinity - as very fractured by anxieties and fear of the female body, the fear of losing power - all these things I think are very important because they need to be relocated within a social, political and economic context.
As you know, we have a collection of lots of amazing female voices in film, one of which is Joanna Hogg who said: “Laura Mulvey’s films and her ideas about cinema have helped shape not only how I see film, but how I see the world.” You’ve been a real reference point for her. How do you think her work speaks to the questions that you set in motion?
There are two films that she made that are really important to me and that I’ve been thinking about a lot; and only really for lack of time have I not yet written about them or interviewed Joanna herself.
I think there’s an extraordinary originality and courage to her work. The Souvenir: Part I really is very much about a crisis of masculinity, a presentation of masculinity as a masquerade; Anthony, is out of sync with his own generation and is performing a rather self-conscious archaic masculinity that belongs to an earlier era. It’s really relevant that Joanna went back to the 1980s, as there’s a relationship to Englishness there and she’s associating a kind of nostalgia and melancholy for a lost secure male dominant class and national identity, revealing the way in which it’s built on insecurities, which might have a different kind of relevance to now.
But I also think that Joanna’s mode of filmmaking, the way in which she avoids linear narrativity and works in little tableaux / scenes - in which there’s a continuity of time within a particular scene and then that is merged seamlessly into another scene, there’s a break and then another tableau emerges - to my mind, is an extremely interesting way of evoking the fragmentary-ness of memory but also, a kind of feminine poetic aesthetic which avoids the linear and avoids the cause and effect and as it were, recognises the caesuras and the breaks between moments and events. Rather than the conventional way in which narrative is driven by action, this is a narrative driven by emotion and the foregrounding of emotion is really crucial there.
The Souvenir: Part II then picks up the other side, drawing on Freud’s essay Mourning & Melancholia. Joanna gives an extraordinary portrait of the process of mourning in which repetition is a way of holding onto the past and not letting go of something traumatic. So, that sense of going back and repeating, which The Souvenir: Part I is, and then The Souvenir: Part II reenacts repetition compulsion, as it were, and you see the whole process of her insistence on holding onto the past until the end where to a certain extent, there’s a release and she manages to come back into the world.
Are there any other contemporary filmmakers who, like Joanna Hogg, have made an impression on you?
Well, lately I’ve been interested in writing about mother-daughter relationships (the fantasy of the maternal, the reality of the maternal and the ways of working between this) and so, I’d like to look more closely at Joanna’s last film The Eternal Daughter and to think about the way there, she’s giving once again, an aesthetic reflection via the cinema - because Joanna is a very cinematic thinker and creator, she thinks through the cinema - so that film would also be important in terms of my interest in representations of motherhood. I also loved - I don’t know if you saw Céline Sciamma’s film Petite Maman? There again, the mother-daughter relationship is reworked in such a fascinating way.
Yes, we love Céline Sciamma! Was there a particular moment from Petite Maman that struck you in relation to that thought?
I think just the idea that you can reimagine your mothers, your best friend, is important - from a psychoanalytic point of view; but I also think it’s relevant in its feminist engagement with a depiction of time. The way in which the past and the future are put into dialogue together so that it’s about a re-imagination of a feminine time, once again. I think there’s something of that in The Eternal Daughter as well… Actually, just to answer your question - the image (from Petite Maman) that came to my mind: the idea that the two little girls go and build a little hut in the woods together, I think that must be resonant for very many people. Do you know Gaston Bachelard? The Poetics of Space. It’s about how the imagination occupies and produces privileged spaces; such as the reverie that goes up into the attic and uses the attic as a sight of poetry, reverie, imagination. So, I love the way in which the little hut in the woods was the sight of reverie and imagination in Petite Maman.
Is there another female filmmaker that comes to mind that should be celebrated by Girls on Tops?
Well, I was actually thinking this morning - might I be asked that question and who would I say… One filmmaker who means a lot to me is an Iranian woman called Rakhshān Banietemad. Obviously she’s not very well known here but one of her films is going to be showing as part of my Big Screen classics series at BFI in December: Under The Skin of the City. It’s a film about a working class family in Tehran and it’s a real melodrama, but understanding melodrama within a class setting as well as just an agenda setting, so the two come together very beautifully there. She’s made a lot of really interesting films about women and I think, from an international point of view, she’s a really important filmmaker who, because of being Iranian, probably doesn’t get that much attention, but she has a large body of work. So I suppose I’d thought I’d mention her.
Thank you so much for your time, genuinely it’s been a real pleasure to talk to you.
So, Laura, you’ll write this up, will you?
Yes, so we have an editorial platform called Read Me -
Oh, I see.
- and we have all kinds of essays, articles and interviews on there… Because, at the end of the day, it’s not just t-shirts, you know. We use profits to fund female-led filmmaking and writing on film.
I think that’s fantastic. Supporting women writers is one of the things at the moment. Could you send me a link?
______
If you’re interested in exploring more of Mulvey’s cinematic influences, her Big Screen Classics: Laura Mulvey Selects runs at BFI Southbank throughout December.
You can also watch Laura Mulvey: Thinking Through Film film collection on BFI Player