The lack of focus on gender renders this piece tangential to the section as a whole. Here she argues for the film as both an elegiac farewell to classical cinema and a celebration of the radical new forms that Godard and others were instrumental in developing. The final chapter in the section turns to Godard’s Le Mépristo further reflect on the studio system crisis. emblematic of the period and its contradictions” (p.57). Opening with some (rather pointless) Charlie Chaplin parallels, an otherwise astute and sympathetic chapter on Marilyn Monroe’s star image shows how Monroe’s “superstar persona arises at the time of the Hollywood studio system’s decline and is thus ….
This leads to a striking return to Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) in which Mulvey admits that her initial reading of the film, immersed in feminist critique, may have underestimated the self-reflexivity of Hitchcock’s approach to voyeurism, fetishism, and male constructions of femininity. Mulvey begins with a fine chapter on Lola Montès (1955) that approaches that film as Ophüls’s “most sustained reflection on the female star as spectacle and commodity and as an image for circulation and exchange” (p.25). Part One, significantly titled “A Last Chapter”, focuses on women in male-directed 1950s cinema, “a time of industrial decline,” Mulvey writes, “but also the decade in which some of the greatest films of the studio system were made” (p.73). Issues concerning women, time and cinematic representation and spectatorship are woven throughout the majority of the chapters, and the book’s “play” with temporality is evident not only in terms of its content but also in its structure.
As Mulvey notes in the Preface, the new book “returns to my longstanding preoccupation with women in film, their histories, their stories and their images” (p.10). The new book is divided into three main parts, and boasts an Appendix, “Ten Frequently Asked Questions about ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'”, in which Mulvey addresses some of the responses to her classic polemic, which has, of course, been rigorously critiqued by scholars since its first appearance. Afterimages: On Cinema, Women and Changing Times brings together a selection of lectures and essays that Mulvey has written over the last 13 years: that is, since the publication of Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image in 2006. The recent death of Peter Wollen, Mulvey’s collaborator on some of those film projects, including 1977’s Riddles of the Sphinx, gives greater poignancy to the appearance of her latest volume. This makes her the rare critic/theorist with the distinction - OK, let’s go ahead and call it the advantage - of also being a practitioner, one capable of bringing a filmmaker’s sensitivity to her close readings of particular works. What’s more, she has also put her camera where her mouth is, if you will, by turning to feminist counter-cinema filmmaking herself. Though perhaps inevitably defined by that game-changing, classic piece, Mulvey has, of course, continued her work and research as a professor at Birkbeck, University of London. With 1975’s “ Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” first published in the journal Screen, Laura Mulvey produced a definitional essay that achieved the rare feat of making an impact beyond the confines of academia, its acute analysis of gendered film spectatorship bringing concepts such as “the male gaze” into common as well as critical parlance.
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