Watch an excerpt of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's innovative 1977 film Riddles Of The Sphinx, sountracked by Soft Machine's Mike Ratledge. The recently released DVD of the film is reviewed by Nick Cain in The Wire 357.
Made in 1977 by directors and film theorists Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, Riddles Of The Sphinx fell into obscurity shortly after its release, but has recently been made available on DVD for the first time by the British Film Institute.
Riddles Of The Sphinx was an expression of the then married couple's political commitment and interest in dissecting the language of film making. Mulvey's 1975 manifesto "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" is widely considered one of the most important early contributions to feminist film theory.
The film is available from the BFI in dual format DVD/Blu-Ray, and comes with a booklet of essays, including a contribution by The Wire's Rob Young, looking at the film's multitrack synthesizer score composed by Soft Machine's Mike Ratledge.
Read more about the making of Riddles Of The Sphinx by Mulvey herself, at the BFI site.
