Directed by Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen • Drama • With Dinah Stabb, Merdelle Jordine, Rhiannon Tise • 1977 • 92 minutes
Laura Mulvey, author of the seminal essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, helped to establish feminist film theory as a legitimate field of study. With Peter Wollen, she directed one of the most visually stimulating, theoretically rigorous films to emerge from the 1970s. RIDDLES OF THE SPHINX is a landmark fusion of feminism and formal experimentation that seeks to create a non-sexist film language. Its title figure, the legendary creature of antiquity, terrorized Thebes and self-destructed only after Oedipus correctly answered her riddle. Invoking and challenging traditional interpretations of the Oedipus story as a movement from matriarchal culture to patriarchal order, the film also probes representation in film itself. The central narrative section, about Louise, a middle-class woman, and her four-year-old daughter Ana, is an inquiry into the arbitrary nature of conventional film techniques that captures Louise's struggles with motherhood in a patriarchal society.
Up Next in Fearless Females
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Good Manners
Directed by Juliana Rojas & Marco Dutra • Drama • With Sabél Zuaa, Marjorie Estiano, Miguel Lobo • 2017 • 135 minutes
Filmmakers Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra’s second collaboration (after the acclaimed Hard Labor) deftly integrates art-house and genre cinema to create a thrilling and dark g...
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Devil in the Flesh (Marco Bellocchio)
Directed by Marco Bellocchio • Drama • With Maruschka Detmers • 1986 • 109 minutes
One of the most controversial Italians films of the '80s, DEVIL IN THE FLESH takes Raymond Radiguet's classic novel and updates it to modern times. Dealing with the legacy of Italy's "leaden years" and the afterma...
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Blind (Eskil Vogt)
Directed by Eskil Vogt • Drama • With Ellen Dorrit Petersen, Henrik Rafaelsen, Vera Vitali • 2015 • 96 minutes
Ingrid (Ellen Dorrit Pettersen) is a woman contending with the loss of vision. In trying to navigate a world without sight, she spends her days attempting to reconstruct the visual worl...
