Riddles of the Sphinx (Mulvey - Wollen 1977)

[trep]

IMDb

[quote]One of the most visually stimulating, theoretically rigorous films to emerge from the 1970s, this landmark fusion of feminism and formal experimentation seeks to create a non-sexist film language. Its title figure, the legendary creature of antiquity, terrorized Thebes and self-destructed only after Oedipus correctly answered her riddle. Invoking and challenging traditional interpretations of the Oedipus story as a movement from matriarchal culture to patriarchal order, the film also probes representation in film itself. The central narrative section, about Louise, a middle-class woman, and her four-year-old daughter Ana, is an inquiry into the arbitrary nature of conventional film techniques that captures Louise's struggles with motherhood in a patriarchal society.

"Initially the soundtrack is devoted to her rhyming, circular stream of consciousness; only as her husband announces that he is leaving her does it break into synch-sound. Throughout, Louise's oblique progress with motherhood is depicted in a series of thirteen 360-degree panning shots. The effect is to rotate the boundaries of her world in a slow delirium. As its title suggests, 'Riddles of the Sphinx' is meant to raise questions. To that end, it succeeds admirably."
J. Hoberman
The Village Voice

". . . the film can be grasped from a number of different angles, and each one delivers its quota of interest and pleasure to the spectator. Such openness is a precious quality in the cinema, whether commercial or avant-garde, in both of which coercive strategies have often reigned supreme. To find a film which crosses the frontiers of different audience expectations, which is unassuming and yet rigorous in its intellectual stance, and pleasurable and provocative at the same time, is rare indeed."
Geoffrey Howell-Smith
Sight & Sound [/quote]

Fitz gave me the DVDR, I made the rip. It's a much studied classic of feminist-structuralism .

The movie:

Riddles of the Sphinx (Mulvey - Wollen 1977).(thanks fitz!).avi

As it's a complex movie, I also scanned the script (which is very detailed and will ease the understanding of the movie I hope):

Mulvey - Wollen - Riddles of the Sphinx - Script.pdf

Finally, this is the famous essay by Mulvey whose ideas (widely abused and touted as a holy text by people too lazy to study or enjoy feminism or psychanalisis, it seems) underlie this movie:

Laura Mulvey - Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.rtf

(me, I've yet to see the movie or read the essay, so don't ask ... but I will, soon, honest!)

[Fitzcarraldo]

oh thanks for the rip Trep and thanks for that script and essay!! The film is really difficult to follow.

[by_MaRio]

Unknown to me, but lets take a loog at this "classic of avant-garde feminist cinema" 8O
Thanks a lot, Trep

[trep]

oh thanks for the rip Trep and thanks for that script and essay!! The film is really difficult to follow.

Thank to you for the DVD sir Fitz (we bow one in front of the other, waving our big sloppy hat full of peacock's feathers in a wide descending spiral ).

Btw, to complete the context, here's something about the other text that inspired this work:

" In his influential text, «The Two Avant-Gardes,» Peter Wollen established a nearly unbridgeable division between two tendencies within avant-garde film of the 1960s and 70s. That which he termed the «Co-op Movement» was North American in origin and was most closely linked to the traditions and imperatives of the art world in that it sought to apply Greenbergian criteria for modernist painting to an examination of a medium which is composed, most fundamentally, of light, celluloid and time. [7] This has led, in Wollen's estimation, to an essentialism, an ontology not of the profilmic (as is the case in the realist project, à la Bazin) but of the nature of the cinematic process, or what he there terms «pure film.» It is no coincidence that this is the title given by David E. James to his chapter on structural film. Indeed James' «Allegories of Cinema» in its entirety can be considered an expansion of (and response to) Wollen's model, applied to American film in the 1960s. [8] Predictably, Wieland's work is located (by James) on the «Co-op Movement» side of the paradigm, within the context of «pure film.» But what is Wollen's other option? He traces a line from the Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s through to the avant-garde narrative filmmakers of 1960s and 70s Europe (such as Jean-Luc Godard and Straub-Huillet), the common denominator being a simultaneous emphasis on the signified of images, on the significance of the profilmic in a realist sense, and the calling into question of the apparently self-evident relationship between signifier and signified. Thus focus switches here from the dispositif of the medium as defined by the rarefied contemporary art world to that defined by a film with an audience, created for mass agitation. A consideration of the process of signification is key in both cases – but to radically different ends. Regarding Godard's «Demoiselles d'Avignon» Wollen writes, «it dislocates signifier from signified, asserting – as such a dislocation must – the primacy of the first, without in any way dissolving the second.« [9] But what are the means of such a dislocation? In how many ways may it be brought about? At the close of his text, Wollen yearns for a convergence between these ostensibly so different methodologies, never suspecting he may have overlooked it. Although Wollen underscores the fact that the division between the two avant-gardes is not simply drawn along the lines of the absence or presence of political commitment, it is clear that divergent relationships to the referential qualities of filmic images are at issue here – and by extension, their divergent potential to affect political enlightenment. What is lacking for Wollen is a film that combines an investigation of the filmic dispositif in both the most mechanical and the most social sense, and at the same time does not disdain the attention of a mass audience."

[ http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/ar ... wieland/4/ ]

[auess]

8O 8O 8O 8O 8O !!!!!
I remember once referred this rare film when I was talking about "woman make movies" with Fitz, never dare image I can see it soooo soon...

THANKS YOU ALL, both Trep and Fitz.

[el_saturn]

Thanks for sharing the script trep

[fiddles]

wow absolutely amazing

[lilianalc]

The film is uncomplete, I amonly with 73% of it. Someone can reseed the film? The script is completely without fonts, Thanks!