Laura Mulvey Research

   

Laura Mulvey (born August 15, 1941) is a British Feminist film theorist. She was educated at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. She is currently professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She worked at the British Film Institute for many years before taking up her current position.

Laura Mulvey is best know for her essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ , written 1973 and published in 1975 in the influential British film theory journal Screen. It later appeared in a collection of her essays entitled Visual and Other Pleasures and numerous other anthologies. Her article was one of the first major essays that helped shift the orientation of film theory towards a psychoanalytic framework (a school academic film criticism that developed in the 1970s and 80s, is closely allied with critical theory and that analyses films from the perspective of psychoanalysis) influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan

Prior to Mulvey, Film theorists such as jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz had attempted to use psychoanalytic ideas in their theoretical accounts of the cinema, but Mulvey’s contribution was to inaugurate the intersection of film theory, psychoanalysis and feminism.

Mulvey’s article engaged in no empirical research on film audiences. She instead stated that she intended to use Freud and Lacan’s concepts as a poloticical weapon. She then used some of their concepts to argue that the cinematic apparatus of classical Hollywood cinema inevitably put the spectator in a masculine subject position with the figure of the women on the screen as the object of desire. Basically Mulvey’s theory looks at how the masculine subject will tend to look more towards the sexy women and will pay more attention to them, as they are the objects of desire.