Dossier

Abstract

I cannot remember when I first attempted to read ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’. To adapt the famous saying about the previous decade, if you can remember the 1970s you probably weren't there. But I know that it was after I had viewed Penthesilea (Laura and her then partner Peter Wollen's 1974 analysis of the figure of the amazon) and Riddles of the Sphinx. As a cultural journalist I was more likely to encounter Laura's films than any Screen essay, and in 1977 Riddles' opening was given cover-article treatment at Time Out, where I worked.1 That in itself tells you a great deal about the time – the attention the BFI Production Board drew to avant-garde film, the lowered barriers between the mainstream and the experimental, and between ‘theory’ and criticism in general. Not everybody was happy about this. I remember the late Paul Willemen complaining that the use of theory by Time Out critics in the 1970s (a group that included Chris Petit, Dave Pirie, Tony Rayns, Judith Williamson and John Wyver) resembled natives conducting a cargo cult. But somehow we muddled on. None of us was academic then, but then neither was Laura. She wrote ‘Visual pleasure’ between 1973 and 1975 as a feminist activist and part-time filmmaker who had never attended graduate school or held a teaching post. Indeed, as she proudly proclaims, she had ‘scraped’ a third in her History BA at Oxford. Her most notable publications prior to ‘Visual pleasure’ were two articles in Spare Rib, a mass-market feminist magazine that got articles about fetishism in the art of Allen Jones onto the shelves of W. H. Smith.