A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

much closer to my experience. My grandmother had taken care of me and my favorite first cousin, so I thought babies should be brought up by their grandmothers. My sister and her daughter are in the film, in the playground sequence. The little girl with the blonde hair in the same sequence is Dinah's two-year-old daughter, Georgia (Dinah plays Louise). Diane, the camerawoman, also had a two-year-old daughter, who plays Anna in the film. So there were all these two-year-old girls around!

[

Wollen:

My mother is in the film too. She plays the grandmother in the garden scene.]

Mulvey:

But I'd also been reading. Louise's story wasn't just based on observation. I'd read Maud Mannoni's account of the case history of a mother who refuses to abandon her child to the symbolic and tries to keep the child within the dyad. This is there to some extent, at the beginning of Louise's story: Anna is too big to be carried around and babied. We wanted to imply that she was being kept too long, artificially, within the pre-oedipal.

[

Wollen:

Maud Mannoni's books were very important. She's a child analyst, a Lacanian who later disagreed with Lacan when he began to emphasize his "mathemes" and topological diagrams. She stressed the importance of the positioning of each child within a system of "Law" (the "Symbolic" in Lacan's terms). The question that interested us was how the Law itself was constructed and whether it was possible to envis-

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Louise (Dinah Stabb) and Maxine (Merdelle Jordine) look at old photographs

while Louise's mother cares for Anna, in Mulvey and Wollen's

Riddles of the

Sphinx

 (1977). By permission of the British Film Institute.

age a nonpatriarchal Law, rather than trying to escape from the patriarchal Law by retreating back into the pre-oedipal (the "Imaginary" in Lacan's terms), the dyadic relationship between infant and mother. This psychoanalytic approach to the mother-child relationship is also what relates the film to Mary Kelly's

Post-Partum Document,

part of which we use in the editing room sequences.]

Mulvey:

Historically speaking, just after

Riddles

came out, the psychoanalytic feminist world got very preoccupied with the question of essentialism, and because

Riddles

focused on mothers and daughters, on pre-oedipality, on the sphinx, and so on, it got very much tarred with the essentialist brush, which I think was unfair. The French feminists, like Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva, had been interested in exploring and analyzing the mother-daughter relationship in the pre-oedipal stage, within a feminist politics of psychoanalysis. They've been criticized for valorizing this sphere of the feminine pre-oedipal. Anyway, it was a complicated time, and

Riddles

seemed to come into the middle of it all, and was seen as an essentialist film. I thought that was also theoretically unfair from another point of view. While one could perfectly well write "correct theory" in articles, journals, lectures, one of the points of writ-

Page 337

ing literature or poetry or making movies is to be more daring; you can push against the boundaries of theoretical correctness. This, perhaps, is how culture can change. You're not really going to

move

people by writing theory. If you want to

move

people, you can't always have correctness hanging over you like the sword of Damocles. When

Riddles

first came out, it was shown at the Other Cinema for two weeks. There were some very good discussions organized around it on the weekends. I don't think the question of essentialism came up in those first discussions, but later.

[

Wollen:

We also got criticized for casting a black actress as Maxine. We thought we were simply giving the part to a black actress, Merdelle Jordine, whose work we both admired. Of course, we were also aware of how difficult it was for black actresses to get parts, as a result of discrimination and stereotyping, and we wanted to do something toward breaking down that kind of prejudice.]

MacDonald:

How did you and Peter divide up the work of making

Riddles

?

Mulvey:

We tried to get everything possible organized beforehand and leave the narrowest margin for decision during the actual shooting. We worked things out endlessly on charts when we were thinking about the film. Later, when we were working on films where the collaboration was much more difficult, we thought about how avant-garde strategies, like those we used in

Riddles,

enable collaboration, because once we had determined a fixed, formal system, all we had to do was organize all the elements around the formal system. We could decide an enormous amount in advance.

We spent a really, really long time talking

Riddles

through. And all of that was completely both of us together. I don't think one could say that one thing came from Peter or me, rather than the other. There

was