Interview with Laura Mulvey

Gender, Gaze and Technology in

Film Culture

Roberta Sassatelli

Abstract
This conversation between Laura Mulvey and Roberta Sassatelli offers a his-
torical reconstruction of Mulvey’s work, from her famous essay ‘Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ to her most recent reflections on male
gaze, film technology and visual culture. The conversation initially deals
with the socio-cultural context in which the ‘Visual Pleasure . . . ’ essay was
produced by outlining a number of possible theoretical parallelisms with
other scholars, from Foucault to Barthes to Goffman. Then, on the basis of
Mulvey’s latest book, Death 24 a Second, and of a variety of contemporary
examples, the emphasis is on the relative shift in Mulvey’s work from gender
to time and visual technology. Finally, the conversation focuses on the con-
cept of ‘gendered scopic regime’ and the potential re-articulation of the male
gaze through the technological re-direction and control of the visual.

Key words
feminist film theory j gendered scopic regime j male gaze j time and
visuality j visual technology

C
INEMA IS able ‘to materialize both fantasy and the fantastic’, it is
‘phantasmagoria, illusion and a symptom of the social unconscious’,
writes Laura Mulvey (1996: xiv) in the preface to one of her collec-
tions of essays. What we watch on the screen could and should be inter-
preted as bearing a latent, and partly hidden, meaning, re£ecting the
profound concerns of the culture it emerges from, thus eliciting emotions,
pleasure and pain. In£uenced by a Lacanian blend of Freudianism,

j Theory, Culture & Society 2011 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore),
Vol. 28(5): 123^143
DOI: 10.1177/0263276411398278
124 Theory, Culture & Society 28(5)

Mulvey’s work has decisively contributed to orientate ¢lm studies towards

psychoanalysis, opening that intersection with feminist thought that has
proved crucial for visual studies at large (see Chaudhuri, 2006; Rose,
2007). In the following interview, which was conducted in Mulvey’s o⁄ce at
Birkbeck College in February 2007, she reconstructs her 30-year career as
a ¢lm scholar, moving from the concept of the male gaze to her recent re£ec-
tions on the development of ¢lm technologies.1
Both interviewee and interviewer were somewhat chased by the great
shadow of Mulvey’s seminal essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’
(1975),2 whose argument indeed sets the exchange going. Classical
Hollywood cinema, we have learnt through Mulvey’s polemic essay, re£ects
a patriarchal language: woman is represented as ‘other’, as an object rather
than a subject, materializing man’s unconscious. In particular, observing
some of Hitchcock’s ¢lms ^ such as Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo
(1958) ^ Mulvey showed the workings of the paradox of phallocentrism: the
TV camera’s gaze is co-extensive with the male gaze, which depends on the
image of ‘the castrated woman’ in order to make sense of the world.
The spectator, both male and female, is invited to take pleasure in a partic-
ular con¢guration of the gaze through which ‘the male hero acts’ while
‘women are seen and showed at the same time’: ‘their appearance is so
much coded for a strong visual and erotic impact that it can be argued that
they connote the true essence of being seen’ (Mulvey, 1975: 9). The ensuing
ways of seeing ¢x gender identities in an irremediably hierarchical relation.
Although Mulvey’s approach has been relevantly criticized ^ for having
embraced the heterosexual matrix and not having seriously considered the
widely diverse modalities of spectatorship (see Creed, 1993; Gamman and
Makinen, 1994; Mirzoeff, 1999) ^ her work remains important. It sits with
the works of Berger (1972), Goffman (1976) and Williamson (1978) in a
pantheon of studies that, almost simultaneously but very di¡erently, con-
tributed to showing the relational character of gender identities, the role
played by the active/passive dialectic and its realization through visual
forms (see Sassatelli, 2010). Mulvey is indeed acutely aware that the
moment of visual representation is crucial in the formation of gender identi-
ties, and she insists that the e¡ects of representation remain particularly
burdensome for women. While classic Hollywood movies give us back a
woman-object through a male gaze that projects his own fantasy on the
female ¢gure in two ways ^ voyeuristic (which sees the rebel woman as
temptress and prostitute) or fetishist (the docile and redeeming woman rep-
resented as the Virgin Mary) ^ Mulvey indicates a possible way out in the
exploration of alternative representation strategies informed by feminism
and avant-garde cinema.
Avant-garde, alternative cinema is central to Mulvey’s intellectual itin-
erary. Mainly in the 1970s and 1980s, she had an important role not only
as a film theorist but also as an avant-garde film director, writing and
directing with her husband Peter Wollen a few widely discussed movies
such as Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) (see Mulvey and Wollen, 1976).
 Sassatelli ^ Interview with Laura Mulvey 125

Mulvey and Wollen’s movie production draws on and develops many of her
key theoretical insights. In trying to deconstruct women’s pleasure in look-
ing at themselves as objects by proposing alternative viewpoints, in her
¢lms Mulvey has focused attention on, among others, such strong, active
and creative female ¢gures as aviator Amy Johnson (Amy, 1980) and pho-
tographer Tina Modotti and painter Frida Kahlo (Frida Kahlo and Tina
Modotti, 1982). When this last work comes to be addressed in the interview,
Mulvey dwells upon the issue of female creativity and its role in the repre-
sentation of the female body.
The interview ends with a dialogue about Mulvey’s most recent works,
particularly her collection of essays, Death 24 a Second: Stillness and
the Moving Image (Mulvey, 2005). Mulvey opens this collection by high-
lighting a shift in focus: from gender to technology. At ¢rst sight, it may
appear as a considerable jump. Still, technology shapes our visibility
regime as much as the gendered shaping of our ways of seeing. Mulvey con-
siders technology ^ exempli¢ed by the shift to the digital ^ as analogous to
what she believes to be the male gaze nowadays: ‘[w]hile technology never
simply determines, it cannot but a¡ect the context in which ideas are
formed’ (Mulvey, 2005: 9). The arrival of the digital has produced a new rela-
tionship between representation and reality, which tends to underline the
boundaries between what is moving and what is motionless, between life
and death, and between death and the mechanical animation of what is inan-
imate. The book comprises many essays, including the essay on Psycho
(1960), where the author goes back to Hitchcock, focusing on the problem
of the representation of the dead body in an implicit dialogue with Freud
about the dialectics between Eros and Thanatos, and the essay on
Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia (1953), which was broadly discussed in the
interview as well. Mulvey closes the book with a re£ection on the status of
the spectator: ‘the possessive spectator’, who needs to appropriate the
‘ephemeral experience of kinematics’ almost materially, through its gadgets,
the photos of the stars, the posters; and the ‘pensive spectator’, who can
now look not at the world through the movie(s), but at the movie(s) as a
world of images and codes that can be dismounted and remounted. The
interview ends with an opening towards the possibility for the spectator to
be helped by technology in overturning dominant visibility regimes, includ-
ing the male gaze: invoked is the ¢gure of the alternative spectator, who
uses curiosity and desire (Mulvey, 1996) to decode the screen and cultivate
a consciously utopian scene, beyond the here and now, from which to gaze
into a possible future.
Roberta Sassatelli (hereafter RS): We shall go through your works starting
from the 1970s . . . and of course I must ask you to go back to one which
is unanimously considered as seminal, always referred to in film studies
and feminist literature, your paper on visual pleasure which appeared in
Screen in 1975. Now that essay is crucial because it establishes the notion
of the male gaze, and introduces a gendered-located subjectivity in film
126 Theory, Culture & Society 28(5)

studies. I wonder how this introduction of the subjective angle, a subjective

angle which is productive of identity as well as text, is related to the broader
development of post-structuralist theory.
Laura Mulvey (hereafter LM): To my mind, the essay is pre-post-structural.
It emerged out of a very particular moment in which the women’s liberation
movement was just beginning to engage with theory . . . . But the broader
intellectual movements that were beginning to emerge during the 1970s,
such as post-structuralism, had not really influenced me, apart, of course,
from the revival of interest in psychoanalysis. But at the same time the
dynamics of feminism were beginning to push rather in that kind of
direction . . .
RS: The way in which I like to read your essay is that it is an anticipation of
post-structuralist thinking. That paper came across to me like a sort of
coming together of structuralism and feminism; and suddenly the question
of the body and emotions emerged. Body, emotions, and the embodied ^
i.e. gendered ^ subject-position . . .
LM: To go back a little bit, there were three formative influences on me that
brought that article into existence. (I have, incidentally, just been reminisc-
ing about this in the Introduction to the new edition of Visual and Other
Pleasures that is about to be re-published.) One was Hollywood cinema,
under the influence of the Cahiers du cine¤ma, the reinvention of, the re-eva-
luation of film which the French critics precipitated. And then the next big
impact of course was feminism, and it was through feminism, from reading
in a feminist study group in the very early ’70s, that I first discovered the
third influence: Freudian psychoanalytic theory. However, although femi-
nism made psychoanalytic theory available and relevant to me, the first arti-
cles re-evaluating Freud (Althusser’s ‘Freud and Lacan’ [1969]; Lacan’s ‘The
Mirror-phase’ [1968]) had recently been translated and published in New
Left Review. So there was some synchronicity here. And again this shows
ways in which the intelligentsia in this country were in£uenced at the time
by trends from France, almost in a rebellion against the very Anglo-centric
nature of English culture: its tradition of isolationism. And particularly its
isolation from intellectual trends in Europe which would, of course,
become more signi¢cant with debates around post-structuralism . . .
RS: So popular culture . . .
LM: So popular culture, American culture, came to us very much through
the French, but also at the same time there was considerable interest in
American culture in this country in the 1950s and 1960s, which wasn’t
only to do with film and Hollywood but also to do with popular music
such as jazz and blues. In some ways, I think, this passionate involvement
with American popular culture was an escape from the class-based nature
of culture in this country. So to look to the United States was to look
for the popular, also another kind of modernity. Furthermore, this
 Sassatelli ^ Interview with Laura Mulvey 127

combination of the French intellectual influence and the Hollywood popular

cinema influence was quite a challenge to the traditions of British, English
culture.
RS: Yes, I see that. The English dialectic of culture between popular and
high is very often coupled with a dialectic between Continental Europe
(and France in particular) and the US . . .
LM: But one also has to remember that the influence of US popular culture
pre-dated the 1970s in this country, producing new important aesthetic
trends. For instance, the earliest science fiction writing of J.G. Ballard that
broke with traditions of English realism. And during the ’50s English pop
art emerged, again influenced by US popular culture but pre-dating US
pop art. Richard Hamilton, for instance, used American popular culture
in his work, alongside his work on Marcel Duchamp. While some of this
interest in American popular culture was characteristic of artists and intel-
lectuals who came from a working-class background, the cinephiles
who introduced me to Hollywood cinema were people I had met at Oxford.
But in general the move towards American popular culture went with left-
wing politics. But my encounter with feminism, made me see the cin-
ema that I’d loved in a new light. And that’s where I realized that Freud’s
ideas on scopophilia and voyeurism coincided quite closely with the struc-
tures of Hollywood cinema itself. So, this was something that I didn’t engi-
neer artificially, but that emerged logically out of those three combined
influences. But the final point of detachment from my cinephile love
of Hollywood was the growing presence of an avant-garde and other kinds
of new cinemas in the early 1970s, which stretches from the arrival of
cinema nuovo, the Brazilian cinema, on the one hand, right across to
the films of Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton in New York around that
time, to Godard and the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet,
Chantal Ackerman and the beginnings of an avant-garde movement in this
country. So, to go back to our point of departure, in some ways all these
new tendencies were entwined in producing ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema’.
RS: The avant-garde film was important for you because you could see a
possibility of overcoming previous forms, and that was equated with new
reading possibilities which seemed not to be present in the other filmic
forms. Is that right?
LM: Yes.
RS: This is one of the things which seems to emerge from that particular
essay, that the male gaze is also the female gaze ^ namely that women look
at themselves through the male gaze . . .
LM: Yes, yes exactly, that is the absolutely crucial point.
128 Theory, Culture & Society 28(5)

RS: So you can’t escape the male gaze as it is ‘the gaze’: there is no other
position from which to look at those films. This is a very strong political
statement which has been both applauded and contested.
LM: Yes . . . However, I would make the following points. First, that the
1975 article ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ was written as a
polemic, and as Mandy Merck, for instance, has described it, as a manifesto;
so I had no interest in modifying the argument, it had to be rigorous, to
attack as it were. Clearly I think, in retrospect from a more nuanced per-
spective, about the inescapability of the male gaze. People could and did
watch a Hollywood film, against the grain, to quote the term used at the
time, but to a certain extent to take up that position would always involve a
shift away from the magic and fascination of the look, the subject position
that was established by the aesthetic of the film itself, into a position
which could be one of pleasure but would also suggest an alternative and
self-conscious spectatorship.
RS: And perhaps avant-garde film-making helped establish an alternative
viewing . . .
LM:Yes, I think that, following PeterWollen’s‘Two Avant-gardes’ (1975), there
were two patterns or main tendencies at the time.There was the artists’ ¢lm ten-
dency, artists who were moving into making ¢lm, for instance Michael Snow,
the NewAmerican Cinema, or the London F|lm Makers’Co-op here . . . and the
¢lms that I was more involved with, that in£uenced the kind of ¢lms I made
with PeterWollen, more in£uenced by Godard and the European movements.
But aswewere alsointerested in‘countercinema’andthepossibilityofa‘negative
aesthetic’, our cinema in that sense still had an umbilical link to a cinema that
wewereopposing. But at the same timewewere alsothinkingabout thepossibil-
ity of a feminist aesthetic, whether it would be possible to develop a new kind of
aesthetic through an avant-garde one. It was out of these combinations of in£u-
ences that we tried to make ¢lms about ideas, essay ¢lms, and also dramatize
the ideas.
RS: So clearly, your work came at a momentous time in the history of ideas
^ as well as the history of social movements ^ when a critical reflection on
the representation of women and the subjectivity of women was taking
centre-stage. Often it happened by focusing on commercial images . . .
think about Judith Williamson’s Decoding Advertisements (1978) or about
Go¡man’s ‘Gender Advertisements’ which came out, published in the journal
Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication in 1976. Go¡man is
the epitome of the male well-established American sociologist who, appar-
ently quite suddenly, looks at advertisements from the point of view of
gender . . .
LM: . . . exactly . . .
RS: . . . and he does so basically implying that there is a parallel between
the rituals which are enacted in the images in advertisements and everyday
 Sassatelli ^ Interview with Laura Mulvey 129

rituals in ordinary life (see Sassatelli, 2010) . . . Whereas Williamson clearly

aims to demystify a supposedly ideological relation between media and com-
mercial images and everyday practices . . .
LM: Yes, yes.
RS: Now even if Goffman has not really been read like that, it seems to me
that he is, in his own sceptical, even sardonic way, part of a larger intellec-
tual move, namely that the aesthetic (and the affective) is social and there-
fore political (in the broad sense of ‘being implicated in power relations’).
The latter is obviously at the core of your paper as much as it is in most
feminist work. But you make very clear why this is so: it is political because
of what Foucault (1978) could call subjectivity e¡ects: aesthetic representa-
tion places people in particular positions ^ and even subordinate positions,
and passive positions, require some action (and provide for some pleasure).
So it’s political because it makes people actors, or subjects . . .
LM: That was certainly the aspiration. . . . You see very clearly, as suggested
in film studies since then, that the primacy that I put on textual construc-
tion and the way in which the look on the screen organizes the desire and
involvement of the spectator ^ which in many ways I would still stand by
^ also needs more context. So that although the textual approach stands,
there are also multiple audiences and spectator positions, multiple ways in
which different kinds of social groups are distanced, or entranced by the
images on the screen. But I think that one important thing is that cultural
studies actually brought in a much greater consciousness of the way in
which a text emerged, thus anchoring or grounding the text out of a position
of detachment from its social context and bringing it back into the histori-
cal. Cultural studies and film history, the study of film history, have
increasingly come together, and produced a very interesting, very dynamic
understanding of cinema as a context in which history can be reflected
beyond the important, but not all-inclusive, questions of the psychoanalytic.
RS: It is interesting to make such a parallel. You arrive at this position
through women’s groups, feminist groups and the practice of reading
together ^ and in a way the fact that cultural studies in Britain tried to
read popular culture in critical ways, appreciating the agency or subjectivity
which was elicited by dialectically engaging with it, and this is very much
related to the fact that many of the cultural studies people were involved in
adult education, as I was reminded by Willis in a recent interview (see
Sassatelli and Santoro, 2009). Thus, the necessity to go and talk about some-
thing which was relevant for everyday life, or to bring art down to what
was relevant for the subordinated groups in everyday life, is similar to the
strategies of feminist groups . . .
LM: Yes, I think that’s absolutely true.
RS: One of the things I wanted to ask you is to reflect a bit on what kind of
uses we can make of the notion of the ‘male gaze’ today. And, more broadly,
130 Theory, Culture & Society 28(5)

of the theoretical tools which you developed in your essay and which are so
intrinsic to the feminist critique of visual culture. This is important
because, as you know, today a lot of young female scholars reject a feminist
standpoint. Perhaps we shall not really go back to phallocentrism but
explore the gendering of the ‘scopic regime’ and lean towards a notion such
as the ‘gendered scopic regime’, which is broader but implicated in the
notion of ‘male gaze’. We should be considering the relationship between
the subjective position doing the looking and the gender framing of this par-
ticular position. This is also because today a quasi-feminist critique of the
gender dichotomy and even of the ‘male gaze’ has been incorporated into
mainstream media. In Italy we have many ads with a crossgender or trans-
gender theme for example . . . I wonder what can we do with the notion of
the ‘male gaze’ now that (popular or otherwise) visual texts are constructed
in many different ways, and represented gender identities are probably
much more open, fluid and reflexive ^ certainly as a result of the feminist,
and gay and lesbian movement? How can we sensitize our concepts to the
evident dialectic between feminist thought and commercial culture?
LM: I think this is a complicating factor. Freud in his essay on sexuality
that influenced me was not referring to a neat gender division that actually
existed in the individual human psyche, which he understood as composed
of masculinity and femininity across gender. Freud used the term ‘mascu-
line’ to evoke an active principle and ‘feminine’ as the passive, in a sense
that was metaphorical and questioning of a singular image of gender. (Of
course, one should note that the metaphor suggests an imbalance of
power.) But I was interested in the way that the Freudian metaphor was lit-
eralized in Hollywood films’ over-determined division of gender roles along
active/male narrative control and female/eroticized spectacle. This analysis
didn’t take into account the way that the human sexual instinct is split in
the interests of analysing its fictional, ideological, representational render-
ings. Furthermore, the question of power within sexual relations remains:
my argument wasn’t meant to imply that getting rid of the gender imbalance
in Hollywood cinema would do the same for power relations left within sex-
uality in the actual human psyche. And these issues do necessarily return
in gay and lesbian cinema. So, in a sense, the question of the gaze has
become more attached to the dynamic of sexuality, whereas in my argument
about Hollywood it was more attached to the narrative, to the textual struc-
ture of the cinema and so on. It’s important to remember that the particular
cinema I was interested in was a very censored cinema and subject to cen-
sorship right through into the mid-’50s. So what I was particularly inter-
ested in was the way that the cinema itself had to absorb the displacement
of sexuality into these highly structured narratives and highly structured
star personas in which sexuality was absorbed into image, and then into
exchange of looks, and then into narrative. And of course there were
always some cinemas that were less repressed about sexuality, in which rela-
tions between the genders had always been more complex.
 Sassatelli ^ Interview with Laura Mulvey 131

RS: Of course we now should also be aware of the explosive fragmentation of

the ‘male gaze’. We have different male gazes, combining in various propor-
tions traditional, dominant, mainstream or else marginal and subversive
postures. Can we still talk of the ‘male gaze’ as such? And how genre-specific
were your observations on the male gaze back then in ‘Visual Pleasure’?
Because of its theoretical influence, the fact that that article is about a speci-
fic genre is something that is often forgotten. Yet it does not deal with all
artistic forms or even film genres. A perspective on the contemporary explo-
sion of film genres as related to gendered scopic regimes can perhaps be
useful to provide new analytical tools to describe different forms of gaze.
LM: Yes, I think that’s quite true . . . I haven’t written very much about con-
temporary cinema, but there surely are many gazes around. One reasonably
new phenomenon is the fusion of the action heroine with digital special
effects. So once again cinematic spectacle and woman as spectacle can
come together in a new version of the voyeuristic gaze. In some ways it is a
continuation of it, but the ultra-active female heroine is also inscribed in a
traditional male scopic regime . . .
RS: One of the things that was so important in your work was to establish
that women are active in reproducing their positions, and especially in
their doing the watching of other women and themselves. This again is
something that from the 1970s onward is very much a staple for cultural
theorists and resonates, for example, with Foucault’s notion of subjectivity
or Bourdieu’s notion of habitus. Perhaps we should become more aware of
how much such a turn in social and cultural theory has been spurred by
feminist thought. . . . But I’d like to reflect on women’s agency or subjectiv-
ity from a different perspective, starting from your work on female creativ-
ity. This is a body of work different from standard academic essays: you
participated in writing and directing films which look explicitly at women
as artists. I think in particular of your work on Tina Modotti and Frida
Kahlo, which came out at the beginning of the 1980s, continuing your col-
laboration with Peter Wollen, with whom you had previously worked on var-
ious film projects. In the project on Modotti and Kahlo we have two
women who are actors and indeed active in the strong, classically masculine,
sense. I wonder how you relate this particular work with the work on
visual pleasure, and what it has meant to you to move from women being
the (active) object of gaze to women transforming that in a reflexive way,
active gazers constructing artistic perspectives on themselves and the
world . . .
LM: . . . Going back to feminist politics or even the early women’s move-
ment, there was always a double tendency. In the first instance, the women’s
movement made a political point that women were exploited through the
body and through images of the female body. Thus, if the female body was
a site of oppression, questions of representation could not be ignored, so it
was impossible to conceive of liberating the female body without analysing
132 Theory, Culture & Society 28(5)

oppressive representations of the female body. Which led very quickly into
questions of semiotics.
RS: Why is that?
LM: Because the body in everyday life is very different from the body circu-
lated in images. Because the female image, for instance, in advertising
and in movies, didn’t necessarily refer to actual women, the women of
everyday life, but to an image that could be put into circulation as part of
commodity culture, and as part of the general commodification of society.
But women in everyday life, the woman as consumer and the woman as con-
sumed, had to live these contradictions within the unconscious of the patri-
archal capitalism . . .
RS: . . . surely women in the 17th century or 18th century were being con-
fronted with female portraits ^ in the form of paintings, for example,
think of Rembrandt’s opulent women ^ and they may probably have thought
that these images were quite different from themselves, but that was not
addressed as a political thing . . .
LM: The phenomenon I have in mind is indeed more closely associated with
contemporary, 1960s and 1970s consciousness of the society of the spectacle,
(a concept that was articulated by Gilles Debord but very important to
Godard’s 1970s films); there was a sense in which mass production changed
the images of woman.
RS: From the beginning what is called consumer culture emerged as very
much addressing women ^ especially housewives ^ so in a way commercial
images brought to life a new audience for themselves, though quite quickly
this audience got a bit fed up with being treated like housewives, signifiers
of commoditization and so on. There is a powerful dialectic going on
between consumer culture and women as a consumer audience, isn’t there?
LM: Yes, that’s absolutely true . . . I think you put it very well. But to go
back to the earlier point about women’s creativity . . . I was just going to
say that there was another strand of feminist aesthetics attempting recuper-
ate or rediscover the lost work of women artists and women writers, for
instance [two important European feminist and film theory journals such
as] Donna/Woman/Femme in Italy and Frauen und Film in Germany.
In the UK, the publishing house Virago came into being precisely to pub-
lish lost works by women, and also published works by new women writers.
As a project of archaeology and rescue this was very important. And so,
the influence of the avant-garde, that we were talking about earlier (should
a feminist aesthetic primarily negate dominant patriarchal conventions or
does femininity itself produce artistic creativity and a feminine aesthetic)
^ but at the same time these discussions were underpinned and given
depth by the rediscovery of women artists of the past. Alongside Virago,
the ‘archaeological process’ was important in the history of art: Germaine
Greer wrote The Obstacle Race (1979), Griselda Pollock and Rosie Parker
 Sassatelli ^ Interview with Laura Mulvey 133

wrote Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (1981), about lost women
artists. Sheila Rowbotham, for instance in Hidden from History (1973),
overturned traditional perspectives on history to insert the forgotten and
the overlooked and rethink history from a feminist perspective. A number
of these kinds of questions came together with the Frida Kahlo and Tina
Modotti project. Even though, I must say, the project came about in some
ways fortuitously from a visit to Mexico in 1979 ^ but it provided an oppor-
tunity for us to consider the aesthetics and politics at stake in the lives and
work of two parallel but very di¡erent women artists. This project also was
a further introduction, for me, to the political signi¢cance of the avant-
garde. Peter, for instance, had always worked much more closely with the
avant-garde than me (for whom it was more speci¢cally an o¡shoot of ques-
tions of feminist aesthetics). He had been one of the pioneers in this coun-
try of the revival of interest in the Soviet avant-garde in the 1960s, the
coming together of radical politics and radical art. But in Mexico he found
a very di¡erent avant-garde and a tradition that didn’t so much come out of
a crisis in industrialized, or semi-industrialized, society, but one that much
more came out of the consciousness of colonization, rediscovering of identity
and so on . . .
RS: Was this, perhaps, in a way anticipating postcolonial sensibilities . . .
LM: . . . yes, in some ways, yes. But, we decided to do the Frida Kahlo^Tina
Modotti show partly because it was a way of introducing a general overview
of the Mexican avant-garde, to introduce an art and a politics that wasn’t
well known in Britain at the time. And to focus on these two women
allowed us both to put them in context, as women who became artists out
of the crucible of the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, but also as art-
ists who represented very different attitudes to representation and creativity.
One was a photographer and the other a painter, but they represented con-
trasting, but certainly complementary, radical aesthetics. So we wanted to
argue that both of them were very essentially women artists but there
wasn’t a single feminine aesthetic behind their work, which was actually
very divergent.
RS: But in both Modotti and Kahlo the body is striking. We see bodies, and
female bodies, more in their works than perhaps in the work of any other
artist of the time . . .
LM: Yes, and Tina Modotti’s photographs of Mexican women were absolutely
central to her work. Her photographs of mothers and children introduced
the question of the body, but, of course, from a very different perspective.
These were not those images of the female body, of the beautiful and the
erotic, that she herself had represented when she was the model for
Edward Weston. It seemed that she had reacted against that image.
RS: And in a way Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits articulate, to use Hall’s (Hall
and Evans, 1999) expression, both gender and disability ^ they are a
134 Theory, Culture & Society 28(5)

reaction against her paralysis, but also a re£ection on her gender iden-
tity. . . . She very vividly illustrates that you can’t get away from your gen-
dered body, you cannot just do without it, its limits, whereas the works of
contemporary artists such as Orlan are the attempt to transcend the body
and a material given, or ¢x its materiality as if it were vanishing. . . . Much
contemporary art looks like a perspective on body plasticity, whereby repre-
sentation re£ects, as it were, the weight of the body. I wonder how you see
things as having evolved from the early 1970s. Don’t you think that repre-
sentation technologies today, including digitalization which we’ll discuss in
a moment, provide us with an unbearably light body, distant from felt expe-
riences in everyday life?
LM: Yes, I think that the human body, which was always quite detached
from real life, particularly in the eroticized representation of women, is
now becoming further detached in digitalization . . . I think we come back
to the question of the commodification of the body, but in this sense it’s a
more unified male^female obsession with the stylized and healthy body,
which has in a sense replaced fashion. Fashion now is not what is fashion-
able, what is fashionable is the actual sculpting of the body itself. But
that’s another question, perhaps we’d better not get distracted.
RS: We shall move to your most recent book, Death 24 a Second. . . . It is
composed of essays that in different ways explore the emergence of stillness
from movement, considering the dialectic between still images and move-
ment as the heart of films as art. As a start we are invited to consider that
with digitalization the viewer can play with time and movement, creating
stillness at will: you can freeze frames, you can repeat sequences, you can
slow the motion, you can go to the essence of the film as a framed reality
made of frames, so to speak. A film is, as you remind us in the introduc-
tion, a series of still images that are projected at 24 frames a second. It has
to do with movement and stillness and their alternation, allowing us to per-
ceive space and time. New digital technology allows us to play with
rhythm, thus making time more visible. Which doesn’t make time less
real, or more real, but it makes the dialectic between materiality and the
symbolic more evident . . .
LM: At the heart of my argument, in that materiality as you put it, is a
return to the indexicality of the photographic image, to those fractional bits
of unconstructed reality ^ however constructed they might be later on ^
integrated by editing into the generality of the text. How the ‘bits’ are subse-
quently constructed is something that can be manipulated by the creativity
of the artist, or whoever. But photography is the only art form that is sys-
tematically based on that imprinting of the scene . . .
RS: . . . you call it a ‘material trace’. Which we tend to forget, especially in
films, but also to a large extent in photographs, because we follow the narra-
tive, the story rather than the material trace that sustains it.
 Sassatelli ^ Interview with Laura Mulvey 135

LM: Yes, and in that sense I am arguing that as the narrative falls away, gets
disaggregated, through the temporal rhythms enabled by digital spectator-
ship, the trace comes more to the fore and seemingly more physical.
RS: . . . in this sense, even those phenomena which go under the name of
‘virtual reality’ ^ from videogames to sensorial simulations for indoor fit-
ness activities ^ need to be perceived and performed, thus needing a mate-
rial trace. But in the case of these virtual applications, the material trace
has something of magic, something we never get to, and yet is there to
adumbrate a reality which dictates our rhythm . . .
LM: . . . which comes out of nowhere.
RS: Exactly. Now because of my own research focus on everyday life con-
sumption, I tend to think of virtual applications in terms of use, gratifica-
tion and appropriation by social actors as consumers. From this
perspective, digitalization of a filmic text remains inside rationalistic forms
of fruition; it offers new possibilities of ordering sequences, which we orga-
nize as if standing out, as the master narrators, whereas many applications
in virtual reality offer us the possibility to be masters of emotions by
immersing ourselves in various forms of safe eventfulness . . .
LM: . . . that’s a very interesting idea, I hadn’t really thought about that. My
main approach to these kinds of issues is more in cultural-structural
terms, in terms of the spirit of the time, of today, looking backwards rather
than forwards and pondering on the effect of the arrival of the digital on
people’s aesthetic consciousness from the 1990s. The arrival of digitalization:
this is a moment in which the aesthetics of both the photograph and the vir-
tual are characterized by liminality, meeting at an in-between threshold of
uncertainty. This is a feature of my book, which is why it could only be writ-
ten at that moment in time. Because at some point in the future, people
will have forgotten celluloid and the indexical image, and this particularly
contemporary consciousness of displacement from one medium to another.
Now the stillness of the still frame persists in memory even though it is
purely virtual in the DVD. So to my mind there is still a relationship
between the analogue indexical photograph and the virtual. But I haven’t
thought enough yet about the aesthetics of virtuality as such, and I think
that the points that you were making before were really very interesting.
RS: Now, one of the things you insist on is the ‘storage’ function of films,
and of course this brings us back to the question of subjectivity, to the
forms that shape, unconsciously, subjectivity. And in a way, as characteristic
of your work, your answer seems in line with a Freudian position. . . .
Because we don’t know exactly where those things we see are stored, and
how. Thus in discussing the indexical sign you make a parallel with Freud’s
unconscious. And you also draw Barthes’ punctum in: the eye of the
camera is not necessarily the same as the eye of the photographer, which
means that the photograph can speak of itself. Now this can be applied to
136 Theory, Culture & Society 28(5)

digital technology: a film can be seen at different speeds, from different

time perspectives, through serendipity as much as will. Couldn’t we consider
that the storage function is like our social or cultural unconscious?
LM: Yes. I don’t think I’ve put it precisely like that, but if I’d been brave
enough I think I would have. I mean I would like to think of it like that.
However, I was also trying to emphasize the impact of passing time, that
as time passes the images of the past become more precious. This altered
perspective might well be relevant to the idea of a social or cultural uncon-
scious. And also that now that images belong to the digital age, film, as
an essentially analogue medium, is becoming more and more identified
with the past. So I think that both those ways, the analogue period coming
to an end and the analogue period being overtaken by history, give those cel-
luloid-based images a particular kind of poignancy ^ in which one can
move from what one might call a more philosophical dimension, and I’ve
been criticized quite rightly for not dealing with philosophy enough. . . .
But film extends thinking about the photographic moment to time extended
in a more obvious duration: I’m not thinking so much of an edited sequence
which engages with the temporality of the narrative, but rather the actual
presence of the duration of time as it was experienced in the past, then fos-
silized in that shot. On the other hand, these moments of film are actual
and literal evidence of the past and its traces on celluloid, for instance, of
what people wore, what the streets looked like. This is the time-travel
aspect of film as a document; whether it’s a fiction or a documentary, it’s
still a document. As an extension of Barthes’ perception of the photograph
as temporal punctum, the presence of time recorded and the historical docu-
mentation raise collective and social consciousness about the relation
between the image and time. And although this archive of images might
seem huge, we now know its celluloid history is also a limited one.
RS: In the book you argue that the move from celluloid to digital technology
implies quite new possibilities for the viewers, which have to do with their
sense of reality as related to the perception of time. Of course, there is also
space, and you touch upon it. Let’s talk a bit about the relationship between
time and space in the material trace, and perhaps their disentanglement in
digital technology . . .
LM: Yes, I’ve been trying to think about this . . . I now realize I haven’t
really thought enough about the place of space, but where it comes in abso-
lutely immediately is in the movement between time and place through
Jakobson’s (1971) concept of ‘shifters’: the shifting relationship between
I^you is based on space as well as on time. In terms of time, if we say
‘now’ it can only refer to now, and even the now I said a moment ago is no
longer now; but space is immediately introduced, for instance, by the
‘I/you’ relationship, as it is also one of ‘here and there’. I can only be I sitting
here, and you can only be you sitting there, and vice versa. These ideas re-
emerge in Barthes’ book Camera Lucida (1984), with the confusion of
 Sassatelli ^ Interview with Laura Mulvey 137

time that belongs speci¢cally to the indexical aspect of the photograph, that
holding of one past moment of time, a now which was then, which is also
linked to the now of the later spectator.
RS: So, time is the punctum of space, and vice versa . . .
LM: Certainly in the Deleuzean theory of the time-image, the opening out
of cinematic space is the basic condition that allows time to emerge, and so
there the question of space is crucial (Deleuze, 1989). It’s primarily with
the long take, a continuum of space, that allows time to ‘have time’ to
become conscious and thought. Barthes associated the extended look with
the still photograph, which we can look at for as long as we like, but not
with the cinema, because the still image (the frame) was always passing in
motion. But the extended shot brings with it the opportunity for an
extended look, and out of that the presence of time can begin to come to
the surface. With digital technology, the spectator’s ability to disrupt the
given £ow of cinematic time allows that sensibility of the past and of time
past to become more visible, if arti¢cially. I’m suggesting that this ability
to pause, slow-down, return and repeat brings the variable nature of time
to consciousness ^ but still assisted by the spatial dimension that the long
take depends on.
RS: You claim that this is the time to go back to the index, which means
also in a way to go back to reality, but reality is elusive. So the reality of
the index creates uncertainty. And this is due to basically two things: inter-
pretation ^ which is what cultural studies, and probably contemporary
humanities and social sciences at large after the cultural turn, look at ^
and preserved time in the material trace. Your analysis then opens up in
two directions: the fact that the boundary between life and death becomes
very discrete and the fact of the mechanical animation of the inanimate,
and in a way you trace these two issues back to Freud, who is one of your
great, sustained inspirations. Now, in both cases, the human body is one of
the main materials . . .
LM: . . . it’s absolutely essential, yes. In a way, that’s the rather arbitrary
shift I make from the pensive spectator, which I associate more with these
questions of time and so on which we’ve just been discussing, and the pos-
sessive spectator, who is, perhaps, more fetishistically engaged with the
human body. However, I feel that the two spectatorships are intrinsically
involved and ultimately indistinguishable. But from the point of view of
the comments that you were just making, there’s a double uncanniness: of
the preserved, fossilized image, the image of human life which then con-
tinues after death, the presence of the photographed body as it were; this is
an extension of Barthes’ argument about the presence of death in the photo-
graph into the extended duration of cinema. Then there is the question of
the animation of the human image, that I argue relates to the automaton,
and the uncanniness of the machine, of the mechanical figure. So you both
have the uncanniness of the porous boundary between life and death, and
138 Theory, Culture & Society 28(5)

the uncanniness of the porous boundary between the mechanized robot

and the human figure. Due to the indexical nature of the celluloid image,
and the mechanical nature of film projection, these two uncannies come
together. And both are made much more visible, palpable, through technol-
ogy of the digital, which, paradoxically, is neither mechanical in the same
way nor indexical in the same way.
RS: Well then, things which were part of the official, industrial process of
production of cultural forms are becoming now something that people as
consumers are not only allowed, but in fact asked to consciously play with,
and much lingers on making this play easy, accessible, fast to learn . . .
LM: Yes. And I think out of that there are different ways in which these
newly configured spectatorships relate to the human figure on the screen.
One is the kind of ghostly sense of the revenant of the past who appears
whenever anyone looks at an old movie. But then there’s also the one that
I analysed more in terms of the possessive spectator: an ‘aesthetic’ of star
performance, how the Hollywood star had stillness built into movement ana-
logically to the argument that I am making, more generally, about stillness
within film itself. The glamour of star performance was invested in the con-
tradiction between energy and pose evoking the incompatibility of stillness
and movement in the cinema itself. And that ‘aesthetic’ of the star took me
back to Hollywood, though, as I point out, other kinds of star-dominated
cinemas also produce these very stylized, posed, performances. But the
question of pose also raises the question of the figure of the male star.
While the male protagonist in ‘Visual Pleasure’ epitomized the energy of
narrativity and its forward drive, the freeze frame reveals male star perfor-
mance to be posited on pose, but in a way that was both sublimated into
other kinds of movement as well as being comparatively invisible at
24 frames a second.
RS: Given the categories you are using now, have you ever thought of doing
an analysis of cartoons? The animation of the inanimate . . .
LM: Animation, you see, has less appeal to me in this context, because it
comes out of the purely mechanical side of cinema, and not out of ghostly
preservation of the (once upon a time) animate human body. If it isn’t actu-
ally the human body that’s being animated, the contradiction doesn’t
emerge so clearly, and although an animated film is very fascinating in its
own right it doesn’t have that uncanniness.
RS: In a way what you seem to say is that the body speaks of itself in ways
that other objects can’t . . .
LM: Exactly. You don’t have that ‘something more’ in an animation. That
level of the uncertainty of the human doesn’t enter in.
RS: I think that really brings us back to Freud and to all the elements which
can’t be rationalized, or put into frames, or encapsulated in a closed text in
 Sassatelli ^ Interview with Laura Mulvey 139

any way. Isn’t digital technology a utopia of total visibility, an attempt to

eliminate the unconscious or punctum (which precisely makes it visible as
artificial, hyper-real)?
LM: Yes, but the digital nowadays moves closer to animation as images can
be manipulated; the digital image can always be made, readjusted, to look
right.
RS: Yes, like advertising images which are now normally digitalized and
modified to commercial ends ^ models become a bit like cartoons, in a
way . . .
LM: . . . I think that’s very much it. Whereas in the movies of the past there
was always something that could slip, evade ultimate directorial or, indeed,
human control. As Bazin puts it, ‘outside the hand of man’ (1967) . . .
Although always subject of, in Dziga Vertov’s term, ‘the mechanical eye’ or,
in Walter Benjamin’s, ‘the optical unconscious’.
RS: So there is something that we are losing, forever?
LM: Well, that’s what I suppose is something I am implying, but I hate
being apocalyptic about eras and their ends. One reason that I started to
work on this was that I wanted to think of the present, of new technologies,
as keeping the past alive, rather than killing it off. So I wanted to think of
digital technology in a positive rather than a negative sense, but that might
be why I have rather stayed thinking about it in terms of its dialectical rela-
tionship with the past, rather than talking about it within the aesthetic
dimension of either the present or the future.
RS: Will it be like black and white films that suddenly crop up from
Hollywood, such as Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck? . . . Or will we
similarly go back, occasionally, as a form of art, to non-digitalized films?
Or rather to a simulated, non-digitalized style ^ which in effect seems to
happen with films that use free-standing cameras as a way to ‘get real’?
LM: Perhaps the latter . . . Any film, even if shot on celluloid, now its post-
production, editing, is done digitally. So, if you have a camera shake, or if
something seems wrong, it can be changed very easily. Christian Metz
(1982) said that what the lover of cinema fetishizes is the apparatus, it is
the apparatus itself. And he does an elegant fusion, turning the fetishistic
spectator into the theorizing spectator of the symbolic order (who is perhaps
similar to the pensive spectator), pointing out that one doesn’t exist without
the other.
RS: Following from this, I want to just spend a few words on the chapter on
Rossellini, ‘Journey to Italy’. You quite strongly insist on the way in which
the camera was used by Rossellini, the chaotic, as it were, forms, the fact
that his shots were trembling, moving, they were shifting fast from one
street to the other, in the attempt to deliver a content of chaos, of ruins.
This contrasts with the stillness of death: it made death . . .
140 Theory, Culture & Society 28(5)

LM: . . . stand out. Yes. What I think Rossellini did so brilliantly is pre-
cisely that the contrast between the life in the streets constantly returns to
death in the multiple ways we discussed above . . .
RS: Rossellini’s film was shot in ’53, when the structure of the narrative was
linear enough to make a sustained, clear use of the dialectic between form
and content in the analysis. Let’s consider the importance of the historical
context for Rossellini’s film ^ and thus your present analysis . . .
LM: Yes, I think that historical time is important in terms of Rossellini’s
films, made very soon after the actual context of the resistance, the occupa-
tion of Italy both by the Germans and the Allies and thus in the immediate
aftermath of the war. But that historical moment is fleeting and moves on,
once people’s memories are no longer so tied to the experience of that his-
tory. His interest then shifts to the question of trauma much more generally,
for instance, when he made Germania Anno Zero, in the ruins of Berlin,
culminating with the child’s suicide. So that his interest in the war became
more, as it were, theoretical: rather than ‘how to represent a people’s trau-
matic history’ to an analysis of trauma and its aftermath. But what I think
is interesting, again historically speaking, is that with Viaggio in Italia
Rossellini is raising more general questions about death on a more abstract
level. While the aftermath of the war in Naples was one of the most trau-
matic in Italy and is acknowledged as such in Paisa, less than 10 years
later there are only residual traces of it left. For instance, there is George
Sanders’ encounter with the young prostitute, which seems to be a direct
link back to the period of occupation. And then, her hostess, Natalia, takes
Katherine (Ingrid Bergman) to the church of the Fontanelle, to a more gen-
eral kind of memory of the war. Thus the war has taken yet a further step
away from its actual history; although there is definitely a presumption of
its continued presence in Italy, the memory is inscribed only incidentally,
by two women who are marginal to the story itself.
To my mind, Rossellini was interested in a more generalized, ghostly
presence of ‘the dead’ (and of course there are direct references to James
Joyce’s story) and to the specific presence of death in the Neapolitan land-
scape itself. This finally leads to the Pompeii sequence, the excavations of
the bodies preserved in the aftermath of the eruption of Vesuvius in AD
79, almost as though the whole movie had been leading to this moment.
The presence of bodies preserved ^ in an analogy with the photograph as
Raymond Bellour (1990) has suggested ^ caught, at the moment of their
death, emerges out of a deviant and unconventional story line that has
itself been forced to a point of pause or halt. The story starts with the
dynamic drive through the Campania, that is, ‘the journey’ itself is brought
to a sudden halt. Rossellini uses that halt, or narrative pause, to introduce
various phenomena of the culture of Naples, as a privileged site of the past
and of death. In this way he can manifest his long-standing fascination
with superstitions or religious beliefs derived from the fact of death, in
which he brings the material and the irrational together. While Rossellini
 Sassatelli ^ Interview with Laura Mulvey 141

was very much a product of the Enlightenment, as witnessed in his televi-

sion programmes about intellectual history from Socrates to Pascal or
Voltaire, he was also always fascinated by the irrational in the human
mind, the incomprehensibility of death and its relationship to the human
psyche. And the impossibility of the human mind in coming to terms
with it.
But then at the same time I think he’s also making a very heartfelt
gesture to the culture of the Neapolitans and the people of the Amalfi penin-
sula, as being able to deal with the question of death and life in a less
repressed way than perhaps those of the North and of the tradition of the
Enlightenment (not necessarily the same thing by any means). There is an
easiness about the relationship to death, enacted when Natalia takes
Katherine to the Church of the Fontanelle, where people adopt and care for
abandoned skeletons. This is a gesture towards an ability of this culture to
be generous to the dead in a way that perhaps some other cultures find
hard.
RS: I’d like to close this interview with a reference to a notion that you use
in the book to describe contemporary visual culture: ‘technological curios-
ity’. We all have become curious about technology. This curiosity brings us
to learn new capacities which put into question the linear structure of the
plot. We can play with technology and modify the linearity of narrative ^
go back, go farther, slow it down, we can see the plot from different perspec-
tives and temporalities, and we can imagine that we can easily mix and
match different bits, the beginning of one film and the end of another one.
In this book you look at what kind of effects this has on time and narrative,
but you do not very much address gender . . . Can I ask you to factor
gender in?
LM: . . . Well, the book represents a shift in my thinking away from gender
as a priority to the problem of time as a priority. The way in which gender
comes in, most specifically, is through my reorganization of visual pleasure
around the figure of the male star who emerges as an object of the specta-
tor’s possession, thus very different from the ‘Visual Pleasure’ argument.
Implicitly, as the female spectator is now able to manipulate and control
the image, she can reverse the power relationship so central to the cinema
of 24 frames a second, in which the female spectator was amalgamated
into the male look, and the male protagonist controlled the dynamism and
the drive of the image. Now that relationship can be reversed.

Notes
1. An earlier version of this interview appeared in the Italian journal Studi
Culturali (Sassatelli, 2009).
2. Anthologized in many collections on film theory, this essay has been re-edited
in the book Visual and Other Pleasures (Mulvey, 1989), now in its second edition
(Mulvey, 2009), which also includes ‘Afterthoughts on ‘‘Visual Pleasure and
142 Theory, Culture & Society 28(5)

Narrative Cinema’’’, where Mulvey addresses some of the critiques, and broadens
and revises her position. See also Danino and Moy-Thomas (1982).

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Roberta Sassatelli is Associate Professor of Cultural Sociology at the

Universita' di Milano, Italy. She works on the history and sociology of con-
sumer practices and cultures, on the sociology of the body and gender, on
cultural theory and on qualitative methodology. Among her books in
English are Consumer Culture: History, Theory and Politics (SAGE, 2007);
and Fitness Culture: Gyms and the Commercialisation of Fun and
Discipline (Palgrave, 2010). [email: roberta.sassatelli@unimi.it]