Interview with Laura Mulvey Gender, Gaze and Technology in Film Culture
This conversation between Laura Mulvey and Roberta Sassatelli offers a historical
reconstruction of Mulvey’s work, from her famous essay ‘Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ to her most recent reflections on male
gaze, film technology and visual culture. The conversation initially deals
with the socio-cultural context in which the ‘Visual Pleasure ... ’ essay was
produced by outlining a number of possible theoretical parallelisms with
other scholars, from Foucault to Barthes to Goffman. Then, on the basis of
Mulvey’s latest book, Death 24 a Second, and of a variety of contemporary
examples, the emphasis is on the relative shift in Mulvey’s work from gender
to time and visual technology. Finally, the conversation focuses on the concept
of ‘gendered scopic regime’ and the potential re-articulation of the male
gaze through the technological re-direction and control of the visual.