Abstract
This article examines Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s 1977 avant-garde essay film Riddles of the Sphinx as a cinematic text that makes the museum a site for imagining psychoanalytic feminism as a reparative reading practice. I argue that the film questions gender and race as “musealized” images that make predetermined essences present, and offers instead images of working through the damages of sexism and racism that erode the familiar poles of idealization and denigration. Focused on the psychic life of a middle-class white woman as she begins extricating herself from the narrow confines that white patriarchal culture has allotted her, Riddles revises the visual logics of castration, which opens the possibility that white women can, instead of defending themselves against shame, respond to the forms of sexism and racism that write Black women’s lives.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
© British Film Institute Production Board, still courtesy of the BFI National Archive.
© British Film Institute Production Board, still courtesy of the BFI National Archive.
© British Film Institute Production Board, stills courtesy of the BFI National Archive.
© British Film Institute Production Board, still courtesy of the BFI National Archive.
© British Film Institute Production Board, still courtesy of the BFI National Archive.
© British Film Institute Production Board, still courtesy of the BFI National Archive.
© British Film Institute Production Board, still courtesy of the BFI National Archive.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Abraham, N., & Torok, M. (1994). The shell and the kernel: Renewals of psychoanalysis, Volume 1 (N. Rand, Ed. and Trans.). University of Chicago Press.
Brown, T. (2004). Trauma, museums and the future of pedagogy. Third Text, 18(4), 247–259.
Freud, S. (1953). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. In J. Strachey (Ed.), Standard edition: Vol. 7 (pp. 135–230). Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1905)
Freud, S. (1959). The question of lay analysis. In J. Strachey (Ed.), Standard edition: Vol. 20 (pp. 183–258). Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1926)
Freud, S. (1961). Some psychical consequences of the anatomical distinctions between the sexes. In J. Strachey (Ed.), Standard edition: Vol. 19 (pp. 248–258). Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1925)
Freud, S. (1964). Femininity. In J. Strachey (Ed.), Standard edition Vol. 22 (pp. 112–135). Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1933)
Froggett, L., & Trustram, M. (2014). Object relations in the museum: A psychosocial perspective. Museum Management and Curatorship, 29(5), 482–497.
Gilligan, C., & Snider, N. (2018). Why does patriarchy persist? Polity Press.
Godard, J.-L. (Director). (1967). Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle [Two or Three Things I Know About Her] [Film]. Anouchka Films.
Goux, J.-J. (1993). Oedipus, philosopher (C. Porter, Trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1990)
Grant, C. (2019). Returning to riddles. In L. Reynolds (Ed.), Women artists, feminism and the moving image: Contexts and practices (pp. 57–72). Bloomsbury.
Holzman, C. (1995). Rethinking the role of guilt and shame in white women’s antiracism work. In J. Adleman, & G. Enguídanos (Eds.), Racism in the lives of women: Testimony, theory, and guides to antiracist practice (pp. 325–332). Haworth Press.
Johnson, B. (2003). Mother tongues: Sexuality, trials, motherhood, translation. Harvard University Press.
Kaplan, A. (1983). Women and film: Both sides of the camera. Metheun.
Khanna, R. (2003). Dark continents: Psychoanalysis and colonialism. Duke University Press.
Kokoli, A. (2012). Remembering, repeating and working through in ‘Anniversary—an act of memory’ by Monica Ross and co-recitors (2008–). Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 17(5), 24–30.
Lamm, K. (2018). Addressing the other woman: Textual correspondences in feminist art and writing. Manchester University Press.
Manne, K. (2018). Down girl: The logic of misogyny. Oxford University Press.
Mitchell, J. (1966). Women: The longest revolution. New Left Review, 0(40), 11–37.
Mitchell, J. (2001). Psychoanalysis and feminism at the millennium. In E. Bronfren, & M. Kavka (Eds.), Feminist consequences: Theory for the new century (pp. 3–17). Columbia University Press.
Mitchell, T. (2004). Orientalism and the exhibitionary order. In D. Preziosi, & C. Farago (Eds.), Grasping the world: The idea of the museum (pp. 442–461). Ashgate.
Mulvey, L. (2017). Riddles as essay film. In N. Alter, & T. Corrigan (Eds.), Essays on the essay film (pp. 314–321). Columbia University Press.
Mulvey, L., & Wollen, P. (Directors). (1977a). Riddles of the sphinx [Film]. BFI.
Mulvey, L., & Wollen, P. (1977b). Riddles of the sphinx: Script. Screen, 18(2), 61–78. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/18.2.61.
O’Grady, L. (1994). Olympia’s maid: Reclaiming black female subjectivity. In J. Freuh, C. Langer, & A. Raven (Eds.), New feminist criticism: Art, identity, action (pp. 152–170). Harper Collins.
Pollock, G. (2006). The image in psychoanalysis and the archaeological metaphor. In G. Pollock (Ed.), Psychoanalysis and the image: Transdisciplinary perspectives (pp. 1–29). Blackwell.
Pollock, G. (2008). The visual poetics of shame: A feminist reading of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). In C. Pajaczkowska, & I. Ward (Eds.), Shame and sexuality: Psychoanalysis and visual culture (pp. 108–127). Routledge.
Pollock, G. (2013). After-affects/after-images: Trauma and aesthetic transformation in the virtual feminist museum. University of Manchester Press.
Ross, L. (2019, August 17). I’m a black feminist. I think call-out culture is toxic. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/17/opinion/sunday/cancel-culture-call-out.html
Said, E. (1979). Orientalism. Vintage Books.
Silverman, K. (1988). The acoustic mirror: The female voice in psychoanalysis and cinema. Indiana University Press.
Wollen, P. (1997). Thirteen paragraphs. In J. Mastai (Ed.), Social processes/collaborative action: Mary Kelly 1970–1975 (pp. 25–31). Charles H. Scott Gallery. Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design.
Wollen, P. (1981). The field of language in film. October, 17, 53–60.
Young, R. (2013). A soundtrack for cinematic revolutions. In booklet that accompanies DVD release of Riddles of the Sphinx (pp. 20–22).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Disclosure
The author has no financial or personal relationship with a third party whose interests could be positively or negatively influenced by the article’s content.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Lamm, K. Reading hieroglyphs behind glass: A glimpse of reparative feminism in Riddles of the Sphinx (1977). Psychoanal Cult Soc 27, 89–106 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-022-00289-x
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-022-00289-x