Visual and other pleasures (Language, discourse, society) - Hardcover

Laura Mulvey

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0333445287 ISBN 13: 9780333445280

Publisher: Macmillan, 1989

Synopsis

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. The essays also tell, implicitly, a personal story - of someone gradually learning to express themselves in writing through feminism and becoming visibly more articulate over the course of time. Central to the collection is Mulvey's famous polemic "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". Mulvey has directed six films with Peter Wollen and is a major British cultural theorist.

About this title

Review:

Laura Mulvey did not invent feminist film criticism, but her short piece "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" is a seminal essay, cited more often than almost any other single article on the movies. Mulvey brought psychoanalysis, the experience of pleasure, and the idea of the male gaze into the mainstream of feminist film criticism. Visual and Other Pleasures reprints her famous analysis along with other important essays on film melodrama, avant-garde cinema, the Oedipus myth, and directors Douglas Sirk, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Jean-Luc Godard. Unlike many academic critics, Mulvey writes with refreshing clarity. Arguments that in other hands might seem dense and thorny are both comprehensible and enlightening here. --Raphael Shargel

From the Back Cover:

This long awaited collection of essays will be required reading for anyone interested in feminism, film, and avant-garde practice.

About this edition

• Publisher: Macmillan
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0333445287
• ISBN 13: 9780333445280
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 201