Synopsis:
A complex treatise exploring feminism, motherhood and sexual difference in seven numbered chapters. Headings are: Opening Pages; Laura Talking; Stones; Louise’s Story Told in 13 Shots; Acrobats; Laura Listening; Puzzle ending.

Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s film (1977) addresses the position of women in patriarchy through the prism of psychoanalysis. Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) draws on the critical writings and investigations by both filmmakers into the codes of narrative cinema, and offers an alternative formal structure through which to consider the images and meanings of female representation in film.

The film is constructed in three sections, combining Mulvey’s own to-camera readings around the myth of Oedipus’s encounter with the Sphinx with a series of very slow 360 degree panning shots encompassing different environments, from the domestic to the professional. Louise, the narrative’s female protagonist, is represented through a fragmented use of imagery and dialogue, in an attempt to break down the conventional narrative structures of framing and filming used to objectify and fetishise women in mainstream cinema. This could be seen as a formal development of the Lacanian analyses that Mulvey had applied to the female image in film in essays such as 1975’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (in Screen).

Riddles of the Sphinx attempts to construct a new relationship between the viewer and the female subject, presenting her through multiple female voices and viewpoints. The dialogue, constructed from the different voices of Louise, her friends and fellow workers, brings a shifting and ambiguous range of meanings to the film, in contrast to the explanatory authority associated with a conventional voice-over. Other voices and images from outside the film’s narrative world also question and disrupt pre-supposed meanings and symbols of the woman within and without the screen; from the mythical enigma of the Sphinx to the appearances of artist Mary Kelly and Mulvey herself.
As Mulvey herself subsequently put it, “What recurs overall is a constant return to woman, not indeed as a visual image, but as a subject of inquiry, a content which cannot be considered within the aesthetic lines laid down by traditional cinematic practice.”

Riddles of the Sphinx.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1h 30mn
Size: 	3.74 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	960x720 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	5 000 Kbps
BPP: 	0.301
Audio
#1:  	AC-3 @ 448 Kbps
#2:  	AC-3 @ 448 Kbps (Commentary by Laura Mulvey & Winfried Pauleit)

https://nitro.download/view/90CE2EE409C0C40/Riddles_of_the_Sphinx.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English (soft subs)

The post Laura Mulvey & Peter Wollen – Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

”[The film] was planned to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Amy Johnson’s epic solo flight to Australia in 1930—to commemorate it and to comment on it. AMY! is neither a drama nor a portrait in the conventional sense, but an assembly of sounds and images which evoke the subject through historic documents and relics, re-enactments and metaphors. The film also asks the underlying question: What is a heroine? We want to enquire into the idea and image of the heroine, not in an explicitly theoretical way—though the film has a theoretical background—but by putting fragments on display to suggest both the frustrations from which heroism is born and to which it is condemned, and at the same time something of the exhilaration it provides for the heroine herself and for others. Formally, our points of reference are Maya Deren and Gertrude Stein.” (Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen)

1.29GB | 33m 40s | 1920×1080 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/10A0510A9FFFD46/Amy!.Laura.Mulvey.Peter.Wollen.1979.1080p.mkv
or
https://tezfiles.com/file/8dd99317b47ea/Amy%21.Laura.Mulvey.Peter.Wollen.1979.1080p.mp4

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Laura Mulvey & Peter Wollen – Amy! (1979) (HD) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
A robot messenger (Tilda Swinton) is sent to earth to appeal to humans to live in peace. Originally designed to go to MIT, by mistake she ends up in Amman, Jordan during the Black September riots of 1970. Sullivan, a British journalist, (Bill Paterson) comes to her aid when she is found wandering without papers following a bombing and grants her refuge in his hotel room. But there she tells him she is a robot, sent as a peace envoy from another planet. He is not sure whether to believe her story or not, but finds her unusual view of the world appealing. They examine the human condition in a series of incredibly insightful and entertaining conversations.

849MB | 1h 11mn | 756×576 | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/9889D7DCCB7CA09/Friendship%27s_Death_%281987%29.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Peter Wollen – Friendship’s Death (1987) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

AMY! is neither a drama not a portrait in the conventional sense, but an assembly of sounds and images which evoke the subject through historic documents and relics, re-enactments and metaphors. The film also asks an underlying question; what is a heroine? We want to enquire into the idea and image of the heroine, not in an explicitly theoretical way, though the film has a theoretical background, but by putting fragments on display to suggest both the frustrations from which heroism is born and to which it is condemned, and at the same time something of the exhilaration it provides for the heroine herself and for others. Formally, our points of reference are Maya Deren and Gertrude Stein.

Statement by the artists, 1980

The film is not so much about Amy-the-woman as about the power of representations to fix the meaning of events. Amy becomes a legend that can be consumed and her action loose (sic) its subversive potential.

533MB | 32 min 7 s | 712×534 | mkv

http://nitroflare.com/view/450394B2E764FAB/Amy__Laura_Mulvey_%26_Peter_Wollen_1980_.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:None

The post Laura Mulvey & Peter Wollen – Amy! (1979) first appeared on Cinema of the World.