Professor Laura Mulvey

(Elected 2024)

Laura Mulvey's work 'Visual Cultures and Narrative Cinema' has been used by countless scholars across the globe to introduce students to feminist film theory and particularly the groundbreaking concept of the 'male gaze'. When it was published 50 years ago, 'Visual Cultures and Narrative Cinema' not only transformed film studies, it fundamentally reshaped the humanities, and this paradigm-shifting piece of work is as exciting to discuss with students today and as it was thirty years ago.

Born in Oxford in 1941, Laura spent her early years in the countryside, before her family returned to London in 1946 and she got her first chance to go to the cinema. She remembers her first film being Nanook of the North, of interest to her Canadian father, and that Powel and Pressburger's The Red Shoes made a deep impression on her when she saw it with her mother in the 1950s. Her parents were keen film goers, as was Laura herself in her teenage years. It was only after finishing a degree in History at St Hilda's College, Oxford, however, that she became, as she puts it, 'passionately cinephile'. An initial intense engagement with classic Hollywood cinema in the 1960s was transformed first by the political upheavals of 1968 and then by Laura's engagement with the women's movement. This was the period in which she was active in feminist groups, wrote for the ground-breaking feminist magazine Spare Rib and in which her intellectual thinking-together of feminism, film theory and psychoanalysis produced the essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', establishing feminist film studies as a legitimate discipline and Laura as its foremost proponent.

This is also the period in which she began her career as a film maker. Between 1974 and 1982 she co-wrote and co-directed six projects with her then partner, Peter Wollen, all of which bring together feminist theory, semiotics, psychoanalysis and leftist politics. They include Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons (1974) and Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), which positions avant-garde film as a space for the expression of female experience. Later in her career she made two further films with Mark Lewis, Disgraced Monuments (1991), exploring the fate of communist monuments in the post-Soviet period, and 23 August 2008 (2013), a reflection on two brothers' contrasting experiences of Iraq.

When this final film was made, Laura was already at Birkbeck. Having previously taught at institutions including the University of East Anglia and the British Film Institute, she took up the post of Professor of Film and Media Studies in 1999. In 2012 she became the founding director of the Birkbeck Institute of the Moving Image, inaugurating the acclaimed Essay Film Festival in 2015 and she went on to set up a first-of-its-kind MA in Film Curating. As a PhD supervisor, she has nurtured generations of film theorists, academics, and practice-based researchers, many of whom teach and work at leading film institutions around the world and she is remembered by them for her skill and generosity as an educator. I would like to draw on the testimony of just two of the scores of people whose talent Laura has nurtured. Her former PhD student, May Adadol Ingawanij, now Professor of Cinematic Arts at the University of Westminster, writes that she achieved her PhD "only because [Laura] never stopped taking me seriously, and gave me time to try things out, to make mistakes but eventually to get back to the table to string together some more words. She trusted this student, and in this precious pedagogical sense taught me to think and write." Birkbeck colleague, Mike Allen, remembers meeting Laura as an undergraduate when she was invited to give a talk at the University of East Anglia in 1980. This was only a few years after 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' had rocked the film world and he says of the encounter: "I thought she was extraordinary - modest, but charismatic, in full possession of her subject and aware she was pushing it in yet uncharted ways, but humble enough to hear and absorb the thoughts and ideas of those - quite literally - new to the world of film studies. This aspect of her - her love of hearing new ideas from fresh and untrained minds, is an endearing aspect of her teaching style - no-one feels they potentially have nothing to say, no matter how new they are to the world, and no matter how legendary Laura's status is."

Laura's intellectual reach in and beyond the world of film studies has been achieved through her many publications. Alongside numerous co-edited volumes, she is author of Visual and Other Pleasures (1989); Citizen Kane (1992); Fetishism and Curiosity (1996); and Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006) in which she explores the challenge to spectatorship of new visual technologies. On her 2019 collection of essays Afterimages: On Cinema, Women and Changing Times. Madeleine Pollard writing in the Financial Times notes that Laura's feminism remains powerful and relevant in a post-me-too world and that her voice 'cuts through generational divides'.

Not surprisingly, the honours bestowed on Laura are legion. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2000. She has been a visiting professor at more than a dozen institutions and has been awarded various honorary degrees, including from the University of East Anglia, Concordia University; University College Dublin; and Yale. In a testament to her intellectual stature, she is included as only one of two living women in the 2016 Routledge volume, Fifty-one Key Feminist Thinkers where she appears alongside the likes of Sappho, Doris Lessing, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir and Mary Wollstonecraft.

As Birkbeck colleague Janet McCabe put it: "It's rare to find colleagues lifting a collective voice in agreement, but Laura inspires that kind of loyalty". Other tributes come from the film studies colleagues with whom she worked most closely. Dorota Ostrowska notes the incredible breadth of her interests, the interconnectedness of her film practice and political activism, and describes her as having produced the 'most economic and disciplined writing of cinema I know'. Emily Liarou mentions "the impact of Laura's work but also her generosity and empathy in regard to our students, our research, and our connections and conversations with academics, intellectuals and creatives around the world". Hilary Smith emphasises Laura's immense influence on her own perception of film, describing her as "a remarkable flagship for Birkbeck, as well as for feminist film theory and practice".

As another of the many colleagues who have benefited both from Laura's work and from her presence at Birkbeck, I am grateful and proud that she has agreed to become a Fellow of Birkbeck, University of London.