Laura Mulvey: Amy! y Frida Kahlo & Tina Modotti

• Amy!, Laura Mulvey, Peter Wollen, UK, 1979, 34'
• Frida Kahlo & Tina Modotti, Laura Mulvey, Peter Wollen, UK, 1983, 29' 

Laura Mulvey is a filmmaker, essayist and academic. Her seminal 1975 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", a founding document of feminist film theory, was both a manifesto and a piece of experimental writing, offering a feminist critique of the representational structures of classical Hollywood cinema using psychoanalytic theory. She continued to develop her ideas and criticism in books such as Visual and Other Pleasures (1989), Citizen Kane (1992), Fetishism and Curiosity (1996), Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006), and Afterimages: On Cinema, Women and Changing Times (2019).

She has made six films with the theorist Peter Wollen, exploring the discourses of feminist theory, semiotics, psychoanalysis and left-wing politics. Their trilogy of films, Penthesilea (1974), Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) and AMY! (1980) explored myth and the representation of women, while later works ranged from the documentary Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (1980) to experimental narratives such as Crystal Gazing (1981) and The Bad Sister (1983). In 1991, she co-directed Disgraced Moments with Mark Lewis, which explored the fate of Soviet revolutionary monuments after the fall of communism.

Mulvey's imaginative approach to theory and practice, between filmmaking, writing and lecturing, has influenced generations of feminist film practitioners, artists and thinkers.

AMY! by Laura Mulvey, Peter Wollen
Camera: Diane Tammes Editing: Larry Sider 

Voices: Mary Maddox (Amy), Yvonne Rainer (Amelia Earhart, Lola Montes, Gertrude Stein) UK, 1980, DCP (from 16mm), Colour and Black and White, 33 min., English (subtitles in Spanish)

Frida Kahlo & Tina Modotti by Laura Mulvey, Peter Wollen
Editing: Larry Sider, Nina Danino. UK, 1983, DCP, Colour, 30 min. English (subtitles in Spanish)

Amy Johnson was the first woman to fly solo from Great Britain to Australia. Mulvey and Wollen's experimental documentary, inspired by the work of Maya Deren and Gertrude Stein, combines newsreel footage of the aviator's arrival, dramatic recreations of events from her life and contemporary discussions by feminist groups on heroism. 

Mulvey and Wollen wrote: "AMY! is neither a drama nor a portrait in the conventional sense, but an assembly of sounds and images which evoke the subject through historic documents and relics, re-enactments and metaphors." In an interview, they said: "Amy's life implied that for a woman to become a heroine, there's a transition to be made from the interior life to the exterior, into adventure, moving from personal satisfaction to external achievement - literally a step from the feminine world into the masculine world. But when she became a public figure, she became an object of gaze, which meant she had to be feminised again. Once she'd taken that step and become a public myth, she herself was turned into a woman again.” 

In 1982, Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen curated the exhibition 'Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti' at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. The works of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, then relatively unknown in Britain, and Italian photographer Tina Modotti were juxtaposed and presented as early examples of political modernism by two powerful women artists working in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution. In parallel, Mulvey and Wollen made an essay film reflecting on the exhibition and their thinking, focusing on the lives and works of Kahlo and Modotti, their differences and similarities, and the representation of women artists in film.

Laura Mulvey will give a talk in which she will revisit her work with Peter Wollen on the exhibition and film dedicated to Tina Modotti and Frida Kahlo and the different passages between writing, filmmaking, curating, theory and praxis; along with Ricardo Matos-Cabo.

Laura Mulvey is visiting Tabakalera! and the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola as a guest of the Research Programme on the History of Film Education and Pedagogy.

Laura Mulvey visits Tabakalera as a guest of the Research Program on the History of Education and Cinematographic Pedagogy, specifically in the research project Genealogías del aprendizaje: educación, pedagogías y metodologías cinematográficas promoted by EQZE.