A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

of the camera and what it was doing. But I don't think that happened at all. Now, I'm really glad that that didn't work. The only time in our films that I feel we developed the consciousness of the presence of the camera I wanted in

Riddles,

the only place it worked really well, is in

Amy!

[1979]. When Amy is just back from her flight to Australia, the camera pursues her down a little alley. But in

Riddles

you're not particularly aware of the camera.

MacDonald:

Amazingly not, given the unusual nature of the pans. In fact, later, when you do see the camera in the mirror sequence, it's shocking.

Mulvey:

Yes.

MacDonald:

I've always assumed that part of the motivation of the pans was to avoid a "phallic" entry into the image . . .

Mulvey:

Yes, yes, I think that's true. The pans have that effect. Certainly, feminist filmmakers' resistance to the zoom lens has been an attempt to get away from a phallic experience of the image. The circular pans took on a resonance of the feminine. But that was subsidiary to the formal decisions.

We were also trying to give a sense of flatness to the image, the feeling of a frieze, rather than a space with depth that is then penetrated. That emphasis on flatness and horizontality was important.

MacDonald:

I enjoy the fact that those pans also defy the traditional cinematic focus on males as the center of activity, of image and movement. Generally, what

they

do is decontextualized from the necessities of domestic life and labor. The camera movements are perfect for reuniting action with context. I'm surprised the 360-degree pans have not been copied much.

Mulvey:

No. Of course, there are 360-degree pans that predate

Riddles

. There's one in

Weekend

[1968]. There's one in

Vivre sa Vie

[1962]. There might be one in one of [Max] Ophuls's films.

[

Wollen:

There are also 360-degree pans in Jean Renoir's

La Crime du Monsieur Lange

(1935) and Raoul Walsh's

High Sierra

(1941).]

Page 340

MacDonald:

The opening and closing sequences of

Riddles

are closer to the tradition of American avant-garde film than to the history of experimental narrative à la Godard. In Morgan Fisher's

Documentary Footage

[1967] a woman asks herself a series of questions, recording them on a tape recorder; she rewinds the tape recorder, then answers the questionsall in a single, continuous shot. Section Two of

Riddles,

where you record your lecture on the sphinx, and Section Six, where you listen to that conversation, remind me of that film. Were the "frame" sections of

Riddles

allusions to particular films or filmmakers, or just to standard avant-garde procedures?

Mulvey:

I hadn't seen the Morgan Fisher film. Peter knew Morgan Fisher, I think, but I don't know if he'd seen the film. In the sphinx rephotography section (Section Three), we certainly had in mind American structural film and the importance of rephotography in that work. Probably, if there was a reference there, it would have been to Ken Jacobs's

Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son

[1969]. I'm not so sure where the acrobats came from, Eisenstein's montage of attractions, perhaps. That sequence was done by a lab; it was the one bit of the film that kept eluding our control. We didn't like a lot of things the lab did, but now I like the sequence more than I used to.

[

Wollen:

I thought of the "Sphinx" and "Acrobats" sequences as East Coast and West Coast, respectively. And yes, I had seen Morgan Fisher's film.]

MacDonald:

I was surprised when you said at Hamilton College that you hadn't seen

Riddles

in years, and hadn't really talked much about it.

Mulvey:

I hadn't seen it in I don't know how long. The film that I show and talk about a lot is

Amy!

It's only thirty minutes long.

MacDonald:

How did it feel to see

Riddles

again?

Mulvey:

Well, I still get anxious, but it felt much smoother than it used to. Right after we first made

Riddles,

Peter was in the United States, and I did a lecture tour that the British Film Institute had organized. In those days, there was a feeling that the difficult films of the seventies would be humanized by the director's appearance, and we had always thought of the film as having an agitational element, not only politically, but in that its experimental strategies should be discussed and explained. This was not to give the director's answer, or the author's privileged insight, but to give people a chance to talk about ideas and issues that were unfamiliar. Or, if they were familiar, to respond with their own ideas and reactions. This particular tour was around Southwest England. I showed the film at various colleges and film societies. Lots of quite unwitting people from small towns suddenly found themselves confronted with

Riddles of the Sphinx