‘My shift in spectatorship came very specifically out of the influence of the Women’s Movement. Instead of being an absorbed spectator; a voyeuristic spectator; a male spectator, as it were, I suddenly found I’d become a woman spectator, who watched the film from a distance, not with those absorbed eyes.’
Laura Mulvey is a feminist film theorist, whose seminal text ‘Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema’ instigated what is now known as ‘male gaze’ theory. Together with Peter Wollen, she also made many experimental films in the ’70s and ’80s. Here she talks Freud; Hollywood; her own counter-cinema; Frida Kahlo; and a shift to active spectatorship.