Unmasking the Gaze : some thoughts on new feminist film theory and history

Partiendo de perspectivas feministas y psicoanalíticas, este ensayo de Laura Mulvey profundiza en la importancia de la mirada en el cine. Más concretamente, argumenta que la mirada cinematográfica está siempre sujeta a cuestiones de género y sexualidad, de manera que toda/o espectadora/espectador establece una compleja relación entre su identidad/sexualidad y la dinàmica erótica de la película. La autora sostiene, sin embargo, que el análisis psicoanalítico de la mirada no es irreconciliable con un análisis histórico y social de la misma. Para ejemplificar todo ello, examina la película Los caballeros las prefieren rubias (Howard Hawks, 1953)

Towards Other Cinemas : a critical re-assessment of 1970s independent film and video

Four screenings curated by Claire M. Holdsworth (Kingston School of Art) with writer and director Professor Sue Clayton (Goldsmiths University London) and theorist Professor Laura Mulvey (Birkbeck, University of London) in partnership with LUX, London and the Whitechapel Gallery. Each installment examined experimental film- and video- making in 1970s Britain, bringing together thematic collections of diverse works to explore how younger generations re-activate this recent past, engaging with essays in a new collection of writings. 4037 The opening event (Saturday 16 September) screened works by Clayton and Mulvey at Close-Up cinema, with a Q&A chaired by Helen de Witt (Curator, BFI). This was followed by a day-long series (Sunday 17 September) at the Whitechapel Gallery cinema: ‘Activated Spaces’ (chair, Clayton) with guest speaker Dr Steve Presence (Research Fellow, University of the West of England, Bristol); ‘Listening In’ (chair, Holdsworth) with Dr Lucy Reynolds (Senior Lecturer and researcher, Westminster University, London); and ‘Time and Place’ (chair Mulvey) with Kodwo Eshun (Lecturer in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths, Visiting Professor, Haut Ecole d’Art et Design, Genève and co-founder of the Turner Prize nominated Otolith Group)

European Research Agenda for Career Guidance and Counselling

In a changing world, there is a need to reflect about the research basis of career guidance and counselling (CGC) as a professional practice, considering the contributions of various disciplines and research traditions. This paper outlines a possible European research agenda (ERA) to further enhance the knowledge foundation of the CGC practice. The proposed lines of research, which are pronounced in the ERA, are based on a literature review involving 45 researchers concerned with the CGC practice. At three events, approximately 150 researchers from across Europe were engaged in the discussion, what kind of research is needed to enhance the knowledge foundation of the CGC practice. The paper provides a systematic overview of the relevant research fields, and links key research questions to current research endeavours. Due to the necessary involvement of diverse types of practitioners, policy makers, and researchers from different disciplines to share the CGC practice and contribute to the development of its knowledge basis, the paper calls for open, cooperative and integrative research approaches, including the combination of different research paradigms and methods. The development of the European Research Agenda was co-funded by the European Union through the Lifelong Learning Programme

Feminist film studies 40 years after ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, a triologue

Forty years after the publication of her seminal essay VISUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATIVE CINEMA in Screen, Laura Mulvey, together with Anna Backman Rogers, has edited Feminisms: Diversity, Difference, and Multiplicity in Contemporary Film Cultures, which is the latest instalment of The Key Debates series. NECSUS invited Laura Mulvey and Anna Backman Rogers to join Annie van den Oever, editor of NECSUS and series editor of The Key Debates, in a ‘triologue’, which in part reflects and re-emphasises the topics publicly discussed during the Feminisms symposia

'It's a film' : medium specificity as textual gesture in Red road and The unloved

British cinema has long been intertwined with television. The buzzwords of the transition to digital media, 'convergence' and 'multi-platform delivery', have particular histories in the British context which can be grasped only through an understanding of the cultural, historical and institutional peculiarities of the British film and television industries. Central to this understanding must be two comparisons: first, the relative stability of television in the duopoly period (at its core, the licence-funded BBC) in contrast to the repeated boom and bust of the many different financial/industrial combinations which have comprised the film industry; and second, the cultural and historical connotations of 'film' and 'television'. All readers of this journal will be familiar – possibly over-familiar – with the notion that 'British cinema is alive and well and living on television'. At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, when 'the end of medium specificity' is much trumpeted, it might be useful to return to the historical imbrication of British film and television, to explore both the possibility that medium specificity may be more nationally specific than much contemporary theorisation suggests, and to consider some of the relationships between film and television manifest at a textual level in two recent films, Red Road (2006) and The Unloved (2009)

Nietzsche on Film

This is the final version of the article. Available from Edinburgh University Press via the DOI in this record.This article tracks the many appearances of Friedrich Nietzsche throughout the history of cinema. It asks how cinema can do Nietzschean philosophy in ways that are unique to the medium. It also asks why the cinematic medium might be so pertinent to Nietzschean philosophy. Adhering to the implicit premise that, as Jacques Derrida once put it, ‘there is no totality to Nietzsche's text, not even a fragmentary or aphoristic one,’ the essay's mode of argument avoids reductive totalization and instead comprises a playful sampling of variously Nietzschean manifestations across dissimilar films. It begins with an extended account of Baby Face, a 1933 drama from which the abundant references to Nietzsche were either altered or expunged ahead of theatrical release. It then maps some of the philosophical consistencies across two genres in which characters read Nietzsche with apparent frequency: the comedy and the thriller. While comedies and thrillers both treat Nietzsche and his readers with suspicion, and do so for perceptive historical reasons, the essay then asks what an affirmatively Nietzschean film might look like. It explores this possibility through a discussion of cinematic animation in general and then more specifically via several critically familiar films that self-consciously evolve their aesthetic through Nietzsche's philosophy. The essay concludes by affirming Béla Tarr's final film as one of the medium's greatest realizations of a Nietzschean film-philosophy. The Turin Horse, released in 2011, is exemplary because it takes Nietzsche as a narrative premise only to sublate that premise into a unique visual style

Male gays in the female gaze: women who watch m/m pornography

This paper draws on a piece of wide-scale mixed-methods research that examines the motivations behind women who watch gay male pornography. To date there has been very little interdisciplinary research investigating this phenomenon, despite a recent survey by PornHub (one of the largest online porn sites in the world) showing that gay male porn is the second most popular choice for women porn users out of 25+ possible genre choices. While both academic literature and popular culture have looked at the interest that (heterosexual) men have in lesbian pornography, considerably less attention has been paid to the consumption of gay male pornography by women. Research looking at women's consumption of pornography from within the Social Sciences is very focused around heterosexual (and, to a lesser extent, lesbian) pornography. Research looking more generally at gay pornography/erotica (and the subversion of the ‘male gaze’/concept of ‘male as erotic object’) often makes mention of female interest in this area, but only briefly, and often relies on anecdotal or observational evidence. Research looking at women's involvement in slashfic (primarily from within media studies), while very thorough and rich, tends to view slash writing as a somewhat isolated phenomenon (indeed, in her influential article on women's involvement in slash, Bacon-Smith talks about how ‘only a small number’ of female slash writers and readers have any interest in gay literature or pornography more generally, and this phenomenon is not often discussed in more recent analyses of slash); so while there has been a great deal of very interesting research done in this field, little attempt has been made to couch it more generally within women's consumption and use of pornography and erotica or to explore what women enjoy about watching gay male pornography. Through a series of focus groups, interviews, and an online questionnaire (n = 275), this exploratory piece of work looks at what women enjoy about gay male pornography, and how it sits within their consumption of erotica/pornography more generally. The article investigates what this has to say about the existence and nature of a ‘female gaze’