Fetishism and Curiosity: Cinema and the Mind's Eye (BFI Silver)

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Writer and filmmaker Laura Mulvey is widely regarded as one of the most challenging and incisive contemporary feminist cultural theorists. Part of the 1970s generation of British film theorists and independent filmmakers, she came to prominence with her classic work on the pleasures, and displeasures, of narrative cinema, Visual and Other Pleasures. Published in the BFI Silver series, this new edition of Laura Mulvey's classic work of feminist theory features a new introduction and new illustrations. Fetishism and Curiosity contains writings which range from analyses of Xala, Citizen Kane, and Blue Velvet to an extended engagement with the work of American Indian artist Jimmie Durham and the feminist photographer Cindy Sherman. The essays explore the concept of fetishism as developed by Marx and Freud, and how it relates to the ways in which artistic texts work. Laura Mulvey here returns to some of the knottier issues in contemporary cultural theory, especially the links between looking, fantasy and theorisation, on the one hand, and the processes of historical change on the other. What are the modes of address that characterise 'societies of the spectacle'? How might 'curiosity' be directed towards deciphering the politics of popular culture? These are some of the questions raised in this brilliant and subtle collection.