Laura Mulvey

Laura Mulvey (b. 1941) is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of Visual and Other Pleasures (1989), Fetishism and Curiosity (1996), Citizen Kane (1992) and Death 24x a Second (2006). She is the director of a number of avantgarde films made in the 1970s and 1980s, made with Peter Wollen and Mark Lewis. Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) has had a major impact on the course of film scholarship. Mulvey’s interests are broad, ranging from contemporary art to the introduction of sound in cinema, from Douglas Sirk to Abbas Kiarostami. It would be difficult to argue that Laura Mulvey's work over the past four decades presents a coherent philosophy in the sense of a developed and argued Weltanschauung. Mulvey's published work consists almost entirely of reviews and articles, many of which have been collected in the three books for which she is well known: Visual and Other Pleasures (1989), Fetishism and Curiosity (1996) and Death 24x a Second (2006). The only single-topic book Mulvey has written is her short Citizen Kane for the BFI Film Classics series in 1992. Mulvey herself writes that she has “remained an ‘essayist’ and, … with no intended self-denigration, a dilettante” (1996: xii).