Director: Laura Mulvey
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Biography: Laura Mulvey, born in Oxford on 15 August 1941.
After studying history at St. Hilda's, Oxford University, she came to prominence in the early 1970s as a film theorist, writing for periodicals such as Spare Rib and Seven Days. Much of her early critical work investigated questions of spectatorial identification and its relationship to the male gaze, and her writings, particularly the 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, helped establish feminist film theory as a legitimate field of study.
Between 1974 and 1982 Mulvey co-wrote and co-directed with her husband, Peter Wollen, six projects: theoretical films, dealing in the discourse of feminist theory, semiotics, psychoanalysis and leftist politics.
Laura Mulvey is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Director: Peter Wollen
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Biography:
Peter Wollen, born in London, Great Britain in 1938.
Studied English at Christchurch College, Oxford. Both political journalist and film theorist, Wollen's Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, first published in 1969, helped to transform the discipline of film studies by incorporating the methodologies of structuralism and semiotics.
Wollen's first film credit was as co-writer of Michelangelo Antonioni's "The Passenger" (Professione: Reporter, Italy, 1975) and he made his debut as a director with "Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons"(1974), the first of six films co-written and co-directed with his wife, Laura Mulvey.
Wollen's only solo feature is "Friendship's Death", made in 1987.
Wollen has taught film at a number of universities and is chair of the Department of Film, Television and New Media at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Country: Great Britain
Year: 1980
Synopsis: AMY!, a tribute to Amy Johnson [the aviation pioneer], is a more accessible reworking of themes previously covered by Mulvey and Wollen. Far from a conventional biopic, the aviator is used as a symbolic figure, her journey exemplifying the transitions between female and male worlds required by women struggling towards achievement in the public sphere. Eleanor Burke
Language: English
Forum participation year: 1981
