The University of Notre Dame’s Office of the Provost, Gender Studies Program, and Department of Film, Television, and Theatre will present Laura Mulvey, Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her lecture, “Hitchcock's Blondes, Feminism and Psychoanalytic Film Theory” will be on Thursday, March 8, 2012 at 7:30 PM in the Eck Visitor’s Center Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public.
With her landmark essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in 1975, Laura Mulvey transformed feminist and film theory. Her discussion of what has come to be called “the male gaze” in cinema still generates debate. Her importance as a film scholar continues with important publications including Visual and Other Pleasures (1989), Fetishism and Curiosity (1996), Citizen Kane (1996), and, most recently, Death Twenty-four Times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006). Mulvey is also a filmmaker, notable for the landmark feminist film, Riddles of the Sphinx (1978).
In this lecture, Mulvey will bring together Freud and Hitchcock in order to discuss the importance of the iconic “Hitchcock blonde” for the development of feminist psychoanalytic film theory. She will suggest that, with the blonde iconography and the narrative pattern it generates, Hitchcock’s films analyze, as much as they exploit, the image of woman as spectacle.
