UK filmmaker, author, theorist and academic Laura Mulvey is to receive a BFI Fellowship award.
Mulvey is best known as the author of seminal essay Visual Pleasure And Narrative Cinema, for which this year marks its 50th anniversary. The essay has been used by scholars across the globe to introduce students to feminist film theory and the concept of the ‘male gaze’, highlighting classical Hollywood cinema’s propensity to address, embody and shape film spectators as heterosexual and male.
She is honorary professor of film at the University of St Andrews and emerita professor of film and media studies and fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Mulvey’s credits as a filmmaker include 1977 experimental drama Riddles Of The Sphinx, which she wrote, directed and produced with Peter Wollen, her husband and collaborator.
She will receive the award at BFI Southbank on November 4 alongside an ’in conversation’ event. A BFI Southbank season – Laura Mulvey: Thinking Through Film will take place throughout November and December. There will also be a BFI Player collection celebrating Mulvey’s work and impact.
“This extraordinary honour moves me deeply, not least because it recognises film education, an original BFI commitment in 1933, through its first fellowship to an academic,” said Mulvey. “My work has always been collective. If my 1975 essay helped transform film studies, it was because the feminist movement was riding a wave of political energy that demanded new ways of seeing.
”Peter Wollen and I translated theory into practice and the BFI courageously supported our films when such experiments seemed impossibly radical. Teaching has been the crucial means to ensure that each generation discovers its own critical voice and establishes its own practice.
“I am so grateful to the BFI for recognising all three dimensions of this journey—scholarship, cinema, and education—and for affirming that film studies matter. This Fellowship belongs to everyone who believes critical thinking about images can change how we see ourselves and each other.”
Previous recipients of a BFI Fellowship include Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Broccoli, Spike Lee, Christopher Nolan and Tom Cruise.
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