A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

? I assume that both of you had been seeing conventional narrative film, as well as the reactions to it: the movement out of narrative convention by Godard and others who were questioning the politics of the commercial cinema, and the various approaches of avant-garde filmthe two "schools" described in Peter's "Two Avant-Gardes" [originally pub-

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lished in the December 1975

Studio International

. "The Two Avant-Gardes" is reprinted in Wollen,

Readings and Writings

(London: Verso, 1982), pp. 92104].

Mulvey:

"Two Avant-Gardes" came before

Riddles,

as did my "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" [Mulvey's essay has been widely reprinted. It is included in her

Visual and Other Pleasures

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 1426]. In a way, the film developed out of those two texts. But we were also trying to edge toward an avant-garde aesthetics that wasn't a pure aesthetics of negation. In those days, you remember, the avant-garde thought it could remodel the cinema. I think we all really believed it would be possible [laughter]. Godard had talked about a return to zero. For Peter and me,

Penthesilea

was our return to zero (these days I call it our "scorched earth" film)a film that consciously denied spectators the usual pleasures of cinema. After that, we felt we could start to think about an aesthetic that didn't just get its signification from negation. We were still committed to an aesthetic that would negate the expected cinematic conventions, that would be surprising to spectators but could

also

give them a hold on the formal devices we were using, a formal sense of what was going on. We didn't want a system like Brakhage's, where the spectator is

either

fascinated

or

threatened. We were interested in trying to make a movie in which form and structure were clearly visible but which would also have a space for feeling and emotion, that would open up a cinematic meaning beyond dependence on negating the dominant cinema's conventions and inbred ways of seeing.

The theme of a mother and child seemed to offer the means of finding a "beyond negation." At the time, people were first becoming excited and fascinated by psychoanalytic theory. It offered a means of rethinking the world and its subjectivities in just the same way that we felt that we wanted to rethink cinema. We felt that by using psychoanalytic theory to analyze and investigate how subjectivity was constructed, how sexual difference signified in the social, it was possible to challenge its "politics of the unconscious." That was probably the grand aim of the film.

We weren't questioning oedipality. We weren't questioning Freud. We weren't questioning psychoanalysis. We were suggesting that

if

the oedipal could be symbolized differently, then perhaps the way in which it is inscribed in the social would be affected. The mother-child relationship has been so iconically and iconographically important in our society, without the space between the mother and child ever having been opened out. Traditionally, they're there as a unit, epitomized by the Virgin and Child, who necessarily close off and deny what the relationship means theoretically and also poetically and emotionally. And yet the mother-child relationship is one of the most important relationships

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people live through. Our poetry, our literature, our culture cannot

speak

the mother-child relationship; it's as though its "feeling" is beyond formal expression. Psychoanalytic theory does provide a language and concepts to analyze it and begin to "speak" it. So although we felt, politically, that motherhood had been silenced and should be given cultural space and a means of expression, at the same time, we recognized the difficulty of doing so within the language of the patriarchy. It was a challenge. And that challenge was the starting point for the film. We wanted to bring together theory, the avant-garde, political aspiration, and this emotional, but uncolonized, experience of motherhood.

MacDonald:

To what extent did

Riddles of the Sphinx

grow out of your own direct experience?

Mulvey:

Of being a mother?

MacDonald:

Yes. I've always wondered to what degree Louise is based on Laura.

Mulvey:

She wasn't, really. While we were developing the idea for the film I was conscious of the close relationship between my sister and her two-year-old daughter. Chad, my son, was by that time a strapping seven-or eight-year-old, and when he was very little, I would leave him with my mother a lot. So Louise's leaving Anna with her mother, the second stage of her development,

was