Dossier

Abstract

I cannot quite evoke how grateful I am for these presentations. Each member of the panel has brought such illuminating insights to an ancient essay, bringing it back to life and almost making me believe in its continued relevance. Although I want to respond specifically to some of these points, I would like to start with a general and extremely heartfelt ‘thank you’ to all, especially for the balance you have all found between personal histories and theoretical/critical comments. As all the presentations have moved between the two, I have been reminded of a key task, in all its difficulty, facing artists and intellectuals: how to take ideas, rooted in the kinds of varied and individual backgrounds and experiences you have evoked, out of the personal into a public/political dialogue, that is, in creative and critical work. I recently reread ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’ when preparing a short article for the June 2015 issue of Sight and Sound, in which I discussed various aspects of the essay's context and origins, especially in relation to the influence of The History Group (a Women's Liberation reading group) and our collective, feminist discovery of the uses of psychoanalytic theory. Rather than retrace these points, I would like to respond to ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’ at forty from some rather different perspectives, especially as suggested by the presentations that we have just heard.