Afterimages: on cinema, women and changing times

Afterimages: Essays on women, film and changing times is a return for Laura Mulvey to questions of film theory and feminism and it reflects her recent thinking since the publication in 2006 of Death 24 x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. The book is divided into three parts that all reflect Mulvey’s critical reputation but are quite separate from each other. The central section consists of five essays on films about mothers, drawn from very different parts of the world and all directed by women. Mulvey argues that the films have all adopted radical cinematic strategies to bring the maternal out of silence and into representation and narrative. The first section of the book refers back, but from a different critical perspective, to Mulvey’s work on woman as spectacle. These essays, including one on Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and one on Marilyn Monroe, are she, says, her last words of the topic. In the third section Mulvey takes her longstanding interest in art in three essays on moving image art with a final afterword on feminist artist Mary Kelly. Although all the essays could be read as individual texts, each section has evolved around a coherent theme. As an appendix to the book, Mulvey has answered a series of Frequently Asked Questions that relate to her 1975 essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’