Riddles of the Sphinx

Riddles of the Sphinx (1977)

In this avant-garde classic, protagonist Louise deals with a change in her lifestyle in which she must learn to negotiate domestic life and motherhood.

Date of release
1977-09-02
TMDB
4.8 / 10 (13)
Runtime
1h 32m
Genres
Drama
Director
Laura Mulvey, Peter Wollen

Casting

Interesting facts

Riddles of the Sphinx is a 1977 British experimental drama film written, directed and produced by Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen and starring Dinah Stabb, Merdelle Jordine and Rhiannon Tise.

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. 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 psychoanalytic…

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.

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