Visual and Other Pleasures (Paperback)

Laura Mulvey's 1989 collection of essays

The essays republished in this new edition of Laura Mulvey's 1989 collection Visual and Other Pleasures reflect the high optimism of the Women's Movement in the 1970s, its engagement with Hollywood melodrama, psychoanalytic theory and avant-garde film. In an extensive new introduction, Mulvey looks back at the origins of her groundbreaking article Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (originally published in Screen in 1975) and reflects on its historical and autobiographical contexts. She reassesses her 1975 theories in the light of her more recent work on the impact of new technologies, particularly the digital, on film spectatorship. This edition also includes a previously unpublished essay in which Mulvey discusses images and narratives of the 'young modern woman' of the 1920s, through examples of films made both in Hollywood and Europe, and looks at their relevance for feminist film theory.

Laura Mulvey is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. She is the author of Death Twenty-four Times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006), Visual and Other Pleasures (1989; 2009), and the BFI Film Classic onCitizen Kane (1992; 2012).