85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100   2008: Rank | Title | Year All reviews © Nick Davis Author's permission must be granted in writing for any duplication or publication. Browse Films by Title / Year / Reviews Nick-Davis.com Home / Blog / E-Mail		#100: Riddles of the Sphinx in 2008: 92; in 2006: 95; in 2004: 76   dirs. Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 1977 scr. Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen; cin. Diane Tammes with Dinah Stabb, Merdelle Jordine, Rhiannon Tise, Clive Merrison IMDb // Leave a Comment In 100 Words: While I have been alive, no one has attained a formal degree in film studies without absorbing Mulvey's polemical essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," yet her movies remain hard to access and needlessly marginalized within an invaluable career. Riddles combines personal essay, fragments of domestic realism, an archaeology of gendered myths, and mesmerizing abstractions, inhabiting a completely different grammar for each of seven segments. Simultaneously dated and durable, it's more elliptical, more sobering, and more playful than the essay, a fascinating totem of both the pathbreaking energies and the foreclosed potentials of feminist art and experimentation in the 1970s. Food for Thought: You'll be hard-pressed to find an anthology of film theory essays that doesn't include "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," but if you hold out for Mulvey's book Visual and Other Pleasures, you'll get a richer context for her thinking and her creativity, including her "Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'" (in which the lubricious Duel in the Sun plays a starring role) and essays on Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti and on the feminist avant-garde that resonate directly with other films she co-directed. See Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). Permalink Top 100 Home Blog E-Mail