Workshop with Laura Mulvey at Porto/Post/Doc 2018
Registration is open for an exclusive Workshop with Laura Mulvey, one of the most important and idiosyncratic film scholars. This workshop will take place during Porto/Post/Doc 2018, in three classes entitled “Texts of muteness: maternal silences and cinema as an expressive mode”, in which the academic will screen films directed by women in diverse cultural contexts, discussing the feminine position in a patriarchal society (description of the course below).
To apply, please register at https://vp.eventival.eu/portopostdoc/2018/ and select the workshop. Registration is done by order of submission.
Laura Mulvey is a professor at Birkbeck, University of London, and has worked for many years at the British Film Institute. She is the author of several books and articles, such as “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, published in 1975 by the journal Screen, and “Death 24x a second”, book of 2005. In the first, Mulvey discusses the masculine gaze in the cinema of Hollywood from a psychoanalytic grid; in the second, the author examines the new forms of cinephilia and the study of moving images with the emergence of digital technologies. Mulvey was also a director, with her husband Peter Wollen, during the 70's and 80's, of several films, based on a vanguard aesthetic. Her main work, “Riddles of the Sphinx” (1977), co-directed by Peter Wollen, will also be screened during Porto/Post/Doc.
Workshop with Laura Mulvey
Dates: Tuesday, November 27, from 9h30 am to 1h30 pm;
Wednesday, November 28, from 9h30 am to 1h30 pm;
Thursday, November 29, from 9h30 am to 1h30 pm.
Place: Escola das Artes, Universidade Católica Portuguesa
R. de Diogo Botelho, 1327, 4169-005 Porto
Registration fee:
100 Euros – until October 30
(Discount of 25% available to Porto/Post/Doc membership or students of the School of Arts, UCP)
Course description:
The course is designed around four films, all directed by women, but produced within very divergent social and cultural contexts. The films revolve around stories of motherhood and depict the problems of finding adequate means of expression within the mother’s marginalized place within the patriarchal culture. The course suggests that ‘the text of muteness’ acknowledges the problem of expression and gestures towards a mode of articulation through the form and the materiality of the medium, in this case, the cinema as an expressive mode. The course will consider the significance of the woman director, the differing production backgrounds of the films as well as aesthetic questions such as narrative structure and performance.
About “Riddles of the Sphinx”
Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 1977, 92’, produced by the British Film Institute
The film consists of 13 scenes, most of which are filmed in 360-degree panoramas of middle-class spaces occupied by the main character, Louise. Louise deals with a change in her lifestyle, learning to negotiate domestic life and motherhood. These scenes are occasionally interrupted by sequences of Mulvey telling, directly to the camera, the myth of Oedipus finding the Sphinx.
