Laura Mulvey, the filmmaker and feminist theorist, once explained that when she took up her first teaching position, at Bulmershe College, Reading in the late Seventies, she was given access to some equipment she had never used: an editing table, which allowed her to rewatch, pause and slow down pieces of celluloid. This might at first seem a banal professional anecdote, a dusty detail from the early days of film studies in the British university. But on closer inspection, it helps explain the bumpy afterlife of Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, which appeared 50 years ago in the journal Screen and is being marked with a season of screenings at the BFI Southbank.
The essay argued that images of women in Hollywood films are created by and for a “male gaze”. What’s striking about Mulvey’s anecdote is that it shows how she developed a thesis about forces overlooked by popular audiences not as a film scholar, equipped with the relevant apparatus, but as a regular filmgoer, catching films on TV or at repertory cinemas.
When the essay appeared in her 1989 collection Visual and Other Pleasures, Mulvey acknowledged that her priority had been the “demands of polemic”. And in the case of “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” she had published a broadside against Hollywood films without what she later called “first-hand experience of the actual practice of textual analysis”, the kind of “close work” which she recognised as “a key means of critical access”.
The reason was that she believed it was necessary to draw attention to the “patriarchal unconscious” in representation and spectatorship. So while the concept of “the male gaze” has assumed what Mulvey called “a life of its own”, receiving countless academic citations and even becoming part of non-specialist vocabulary, the nuances of her original statement have been subjected to more sceptical scrutiny.
“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” didn’t come from nowhere. Mulvey was building on John Berger’s observations, in the book and TV series Ways of Seeing (1972), on the treatment of the female form in Western painting. Mulvey’s political use of psychoanalysis, as she described her own method, received a trial run in an essay she’d written about the sculptor Allen Jones. In images of women, she wrote, the “true exhibit is always the phallus”. Or, to put it another way, women are a walking reminder of the male fear of castration, and must be stripped of power. Mulvey tried to reveal this process of projection, and the drives underpinning it.
Though the essay is often considered “negative”, an act of iconoclasm, it was intended as a manifesto for feminist creative practice. Between the first airing of the “male gaze” theory in a lecture and its later appearance in print, Mulvey and her husband, the critic Peter Wollen, made a film, the docudrama Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons (1974), the first of six collaborations. If narrative cinema colludes in traditional power structures, and seduces the viewer into doing the same, then Mulvey’s work uses distancing devices like chapter titles and direct address to provoke reflection. Louise, the young mother in Mulvey’s best-known film, Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), is portrayed in 360-degree pan shots, so her body is never fixed in the frame.
Even as she pursued that creative project, Mulvey decided that her essay had been too narrow in its vision of the spectator. Responding in part to new technology like VHS, she developed a new concept, “curiosity”, which – linking it with Eve and Pandora – she felt was less narrowly masculine than “fetishism” and “voyeurism”. Much of the comment from other readers concerned Mulvey’s examples of narrative cinema. Society is patriarchal – the response goes – and cinema reflects and reinforces this, but in blaming Alfred Hitchcock, she had fingered the wrong man. Talking about her experience at Bulmershe, Mulvey said that “close work” allowed her “to see clearly, materially and in detail how meaning could be generated from the cinematic image itself”. Again and again, critics have lined up to say Mulvey’s most famous essay missed a lot of meanings.
The British film critic Andrew Britton called Mulvey’s opening claims “valuable”, but also noted the “blatant inaccuracy” of her “readings”. As the feminist scholar Tania Modleski pointed out, when in Hitchcock’s Vertigo – Mulvey’s central example – James Stewart’s character follows Kim Novak’s character around San Francisco, he is being “manipulated”, not “empowered”. And while there may only be one sequence from a female point of view, it undermines everything else we’ve been shown.
The philosopher George M Wilson argued that Josef von Sternberg’s exotic dramas with Marlene Dietrich such as The Scarlet Empress (1934) really corroborated Mulvey’s claim about the way gender power struggle is manifested in the “sexually charged gaze”.
Taking on Hollywood was always going to attract dissent. When Mulvey wrote her essay, it was considered sacrilegious in parts of the French and Anglo-American intelligentsia to imply that there was any limit to the sophistication and self-awareness of commercial movies. The critical movement known as auteurism had been developed by critics like François Truffaut in the magazine Cahiers du cinéma to prove that directors working with qualified freedom and within narrow genre constraints had produced great works of art. Mulvey herself admits she spent the Sixties – her twenties – “following the spirit of the Cahiers du cinéma”.
But by the Seventies, Mulvey, like many cinephiles of her generation, found it hard to reconcile her love of Hollywood movies, an aesthetically radical venture, with emerging forms of political radicalism. So her most famous statement functioned as an attack on “the traditional film form” which had made her want to be a critic in the first place.
There was one strain of Hollywood cinema that squared the circle, enabling Mulvey to be both auteurist and feminist. This was the genre concerned with women and family life known as “melodrama”, in particular the films of the German-born director Douglas Sirk, such as All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Imitation of Life (1959). Sirk, of all the directors who worked under studio constraints, most clearly resisted and undercut his material. He knew that he was obliged to “go by the rules” – “avoid experiments, stick to family fare, have ‘happy endings’”. But the executives didn’t care about “my camerawork or my cutting,” so he could find ways of introducing ironic distance. (Before he moved to America in 1937, he had directed Brecht’s Threepenny Opera.) Though Mulvey wrote a formal follow-up to “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in 1981, “Notes on Sirk and Melodrama” (1977) delivered the fullest rebuke to her earlier narrowness, offering hope for the idea that narrative films, and not only avant-garde experiments, could resist replicating patriarchal thinking in its treatment of women and the audience. Later, armed with an enlarged view of Hollywood, she returned to other films of the Forties and Fifties, including Vertigo, with greater appreciation.
“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” was always intended as an intervention, not a bulletproof argument. The epithet it attracts is “classic”, and that status is undeniable. Mulvey’s most recent book, Afterimages (2019), came with a section devoted to “frequently asked questions” about the essay. Even George Wilson, as he questioned her reading of Von Sternberg and Dietrich, welcomed the essay as “a challenge to say more on each of the different topics”. That is the role it has always played and will continue to play in feminism, film criticism, art history, queer theory, cultural studies – and, perhaps most fruitfully, in the work of Laura Mulvey herself.
“Laura Mulvey: Thinking through Film” is at the BFI Southbank 4-29 November
[Further reading: Ben Pester Q&A: “Feeling weird is essential”]
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This article appears in the 30 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, No More Kings