Visual and Other Pleasures

LAURA MULVEY is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. Her most recent book is Death Twenty-four Times a Second: Reflections on Stillness in the Moving Image.

“A lucid and poignant look back at the British film culture of the 1970s and ’80s – Hollywood and the avant-garde, feminism and psychoanalysis – from the present of digital and electronic new spectatorships.” — Teresa de Lauretis, University of California, Santa Cruz

New Introduction: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema in the Light of New Technologies (2006) * Introduction (1989) * Acknowledgements * PART 1: ICONOCLASM * The Spectacle is Vulnerable: Miss World 1970 * Fears, Fantasies and the Male Unconscious, or ‘You Don’t Know What is Happening, Do You Mr.Jones?’ * Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema * PART 2: MELODRAMA * Afterthoughts on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema Inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946) * Notes on Sirk and Melodrama * Fassbinder and Sirk * Images of Women, Images of Sexuality: Some Films by J.L.Godard * Melodrama Inside and Outside the Home * PART 3: ON THE MARGINS * Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti * PART 4: AVANT-GARDE * Film, Feminism and the Avant-Garde * Dialogue With Spectatorship: Barbara Kruger and Victor Burgin * ‘Magnificent Obsession’: An Introduction to the Work of Five Photographers * Impending Time: Mary Kelly’s Corpus * PART 5: BOUNDARIES * Changes: Thoughts on Myth, Narrative and Historical Experience * The Oedipus Myth: Beyond the Riddles of the Sphinx * Afterthoughts: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema in the Light of Historical Context