Visual and Other Pleasures

The essays collected in this book reflect some of the commitments and changes during the period that saw the women's movement shift into feminism and the development of feminism's involvement with the politics of representation, psychoanalytic film theory and avant-garde aesthetics.

Laura Mulvey is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. She is the author of Death Twenty-four Times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006), Visual and Other Pleasures (1989; 2009), and the BFI Film Classic onCitizen Kane (1992; 2012).

Part 1 Iconoclasm: the spectacle is vulnerable - Miss World 1971; fears, fantasies and the male unconscious or "you don't know what is happening, do you, Mr Jones"; visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Part 2 Melodrama: afterthoughts on "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", inspired by King Vidor's "Duel in the Sun" 1946; Fassbinder and Sirk; notes on Sirk and melodrama; images of women, images of sexuality - some films by J.L.Godard; melodrama inside and outside the home. Part 3: Frido Kahlo and Tina Medotti. Part 4 Avant-Garde: film, feminism and the avant-garde; Barbara Kruger and Victor Burgin; "Magnificent Obsession"; impending time - Mary Kelly's "Corpus". Part 5: changes.