Famed theorist, flawed lecture

Author: Toren Hardee

Film scholar Laura Mulvey gave a lecture on Friday March 6 titled "Back to modernity: thoughts on reality, narrative cinema from another technological age" in the Axinn Center at Starr Library. As a preface to her speech, Mulvey noted that, in inviting her to give a lecture at Middlebury, Professor of Film and Media Culture Leger Grindon had asked her to deliver something that was "up-to-date" and, if she wished, "a work in progress." Mulvey noted that she would do her best on both counts, but while her lecture was undoubtedly a work in progress, its topicality was somewhat debatable.

Mulvey, who is a professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London, and the Mary Cornille Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities at Wellesley College during the 2008-2009 academic year, is considered one of our era's most notable and influential film theorists. She is especially known for her frequently-anthologized essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," first published in 1975 in the British film journal Screen. The essay, which was described by Assistant Professor of Film and Media Culture Christian Keathley in his introduction for Mulvey as "perhaps the most important piece of film theory for about two decades," was one of the first to combine film theory with psychoanalysis and feminism.

The subject matter of this lecture, however, was of a rather different sort. Mulvey commented on the changes in the nature of viewership caused by our ability to pause, rewind and fast-forward a VHS or DVD in the comfort of our homes, rather than in a theater. Unfortunately, this was about as up-to-date as Mulvey's lecture got, and in a field as rapidly changing as media technology, home video (the advent of which arrived in the late 1970s) is not exactly a hot-button issue any longer. She made marginal references to digital technologies which allow filmmakers to manipulate footage in ways unheard of in the analog era, but most of these references were made in the context of how such techniques have replaced the classic Hollywood technique of "rear projection."

It was this antiquated technology (which consists of projecting a filmed-on-location backdrop behind actors in a studio - the predecessor to the green screen, in other words) that actually occupied the majority of Mulvey's speech. She related the effects of this technique to Renaissance portraiture, in that the subjects (or movie stars) are made to appear more as idols than as figures within the setting, and she discussed the psychological disconnect that this causes within the image.

While Mulvey's points were interesting and covered thoroughly, it was difficult to relate the issues to any in 21st-century film technology (rear projection was criticized for looking tacky even in the classical era of cinema, and now it looks even more so). Her case was not aided by her apparent difficulties with modern media technology - she struggled to play video clips on her computer, and could not remember the word for a remote control, dubbing it a "banal, little ... thing." Nor was she helped by the unrehearsed nature of her lecture-in-progress; she lost her place frequently, looked at her notes more often than at her audience and seemed to be forced to omit important parts due to time constraints.

She nearly made up for these faults with her obvious sharpness of intellect and her dry, well-placed quips, but one couldn't help but feel that Mulvey's interests simply do not lie with the most current developments in global media. For this reason, attendees with a lingering nostalgia for the Golden Age of cinema were given something to reflect on, but those expecting a lecture on the state of cinema in 2009 from one of film theory's living legends were left out to dry.