Riddles of the Sphinx

Kimberly Lamm (Duke University, USA)

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English

BFI Publishing
12 June 2025

Film theory & criticism; Individual film directors, film-makers; Film movie guides & reviews; Feminism & feminist theory

Series: BFI Film Classics

A classic of feminist avant-garde cinema, Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) follows the life of Louise (Dinah Stabb), a white middle-class woman living in London in the 1970s, as she confronts the complex politics of motherhood, domestic labour and work. With a kaleidoscopic array of cinematic techniques and poetic devices, the film charts Louise’s process as she questions her place within white patriarchal culture and finds her voice within the burgeoning Women’s Liberation Movement.

Reading Riddles as an essay film, Kimberly Lamm explores how it utilises voice, sound and writing to challenge Hollywood’s dominant images of women and to portray maternal care as a legitimate form of work, rich in aesthetic pleasures and feminist possibilities. She examines the voice of the Sphinx, and, connecting it to feminism’s engagement with psychoanalysis, argues that Mulvey and Wollen’s film works-through long histories of patriarchal viewing practices and creates conditions in which the full range of women’s voices can be listened to, heard and valued. Lamm explores how Riddles, the second collaboration between Mulvey and Wollen, drew inspiration from Wollen’s influential work on ‘counter-cinema’ and Mulvey’s foundational writing on ‘the male gaze’.

By: Kimberly Lamm (Duke University USA)
Imprint: BFI Publishing
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 206mm, Width: 141mm, Spine: 12mm
Weight: 167g
ISBN: 9781839026850
ISBN 10: 1839026855
Series: BFI Film Classics
Pages: 104
Publication Date: 12 June 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Introduction: Writing a New Language of Desire 1. Reading the Voice of the Sphinx 2. Feminist Collaborations 3. Listening for the Longest Revolution Notes Credits

Kimberly Lamm is Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies at Duke University, USA. She is author of Addressing the Other Woman: Textual Correspondences in Feminist Art and Writing (2018).