Feminist Counter-Cinema is a Humanism: Theory and Practice of “Riddles of the Sphinx” (1977)
Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s 1977 film Riddles of the Sphinx is feminist — at least in theory. In her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Mulvey reminds viewers of the ultimate challenge in film: “how to fight the unconscious/structured like a language… while still caught within the language of the patriarchy,” or how to use cinema to counter its effect, namely that of the male gaze just as Mulvey attempts to re-appropriates psychoanalysis out of phallocentrism (484). While Riddles of the Sphinx is Mulvey’s attempt at such a feminist counter-cinema, Mulvey’s challenge cannot help but echo what Sara Ahmed describes as a “disjunction” within feminist humanist and postmodernist theory as well as feminist theory, as a whole, and its practice (Ahmed, 71). To Mulvey’s dilemma, it’s worth asking in response, “Does feminism need humanism at the level of practice?” (73). Additionally, if feminist theory seeks to problematize the humanist subject and is successful in doing so, is feminist counter-cinema enough to disprove the female subject as a self-identity and define a new subject — in both the film world and reality — in lieu of Marxist humanism?
Upon close examination, Riddles of the Sphinx, in all its post-structuralist glory, may be suggesting a compromise between the individual and the social, the private and the public, humanism and postmodernism. Particularly with the question of history and the humanist subject, feminist counter-cinema is not merely concerned with critique, but also production — of a Man or a Woman yet to be represented, a humanist subject that has yet to exist. Many Marxist humanists, such as Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth and Robert Spencer in “Postcolonialism is a Humanism” (an apt play on Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Existentialism is a Humanism”), have redefined a new humanism and its yet-to-exist subject along the lines of race and (post)colonialism. However, when it comes to gender and, more importantly, the representation of it on film, a new humanism needs to be discussed not only to bridge the gap between theory and practice and posit a more coherent vision of feminist practice, but also to determine how the demands of socialist-feminism — namely, humanism — might differ in theory and practice in the film world.
For one, Riddles of the Sphinx is an avant-garde thought experiment. It’s style of thirteen fragmented sections and stories does two things, really. It seeks to create an “experience” similar to that of Susan Buck-Morss’ book Dreamworld and Catastrophe, which “is meant to be read as a whole, as the argument cannot be divorce from the experi- ence of its reading” (Buck-Morss, xv). While Buck-Morss critiques the geopolitical doctrine of viewing history as “space over time” in her writing and style, the fragmented sections of Mulvey and Wollen’s film is a re-conception of space and time in cinema, abandoning linearity and opting for circularity and meta-narratives that collapses into itself and are self-referential. The sections of the film are entitled Opening pages, Laura speaking, Stones, Louise’s story told in thirteen shots, Acrobats, Laura listening, and Puzzle ending. The fragmentation, consequently, also creates a tension between its intent and practice; it is difficult to overlook the tendency to view history and, even, cinematic narratives as stages or eras when it’s presented as such, aptly parodying the disjunction between theory and practice Ahmed described.
The “Opening pages” feature Mulvey flipping through a booklet with stereotypically posed women in mythical outfits — women as fairies and mermaids — , which is a nod to Mulvey’s open criticism of male fantasies of the feminine ideal. These images are then transposed onto an image of the Sphinx before the camera fixes on the Sphinx as a foil to the previous women. Like the film, the booklet must be read as a whole with an emphasis on the reading or viewing experience. On one hand, Mulvey and Wollen presents the audience with images that, under the traditional mode of viewing — the male gaze — , can be understood and even consumed. These images make sense; they “give order and meaning to its world” (Mulvey, 483). The Sphinx, on the other hand, is a potentially radical figure not only because she bears a riddle viewers cannot seem to crack, but also because she is the antithesis to the “Man” the audience becomes in viewing her sexually posed counterparts. We may look, but not know and understand her, although her presence allows the audience to understand their humanity better. Thus, the Sphinx is the ultimate, explosive threat to the gaze that the female body has been eroticized under and to the gaze that has captured the audience as humanist subjects.
The next section, “Laura speaking” establishes an awareness of the film’s authenticity, or lack thereof. Laura says, “When we were planning the central section of this film, about a mother and child, we decided to use the voice of the Sphinx as an imaginary narrator — because the Sphinx represents, not the voice of truth, not an answering voice, but its opposite: a questioning voice, a voice asking a riddle” (Mulvey and Wollen, 1:11). Yet, it is Laura in front of the camera that speaks and divulges the destructive history of the Sphinx. She plays with her pen and repeatedly looks away from the camera, and her performance is riddled with self-consciousness.
“Stones” feature footage from the temples of Giza and close-ups of the Sphinx’s weathered mouth. The camera slowly zooms in and fixes on it for a while as if to hear her secrets, although the silence of the Sphinx is both deafening and defeating. This great paradox between sound and image is reminiscent of Mulvey’s writing, “… her meaning in the process is at an end, it does not last into the world of law and language except as memory that oscillates between memory of maternal plenitude and memory of lack” (Mulvey, 483). Laura, hyper-aware of the fact that she has positioned herself in front of a camera and has given herself a script, and her earlier lecture stands in for the Sphinx’s inability to speak. This has two main effects. For one, the Sphinx’s silence oscillates between form and content as her voice becomes a mere ghostly memory forgotten and recalled by Laura, solidifying the in-humanity of the Sphinx. What’s interesting, here, is Spencer, in “Postcolonialism is a Humanism,” claims that a new humanism may be forged not out of an understanding of what it means to be human, but, rather, “what inhumanity looks like” (128). Regardless of whether Spencer’s position on how history moves is more in line with Stalin or Marx, his humanism, being defined by what it is not, necessitates an othering, which might just be the Sphinx according to Mulvey and Wollen. Secondly, there is a sense of optimism surrounding the critiques of Marxist/socialist humanism to come — a sense that Mulvey’s reluctant speaking can recall the Sphinx back into humanity, or posit a humanism within the film world in which the Sphinx is heard and coherent.
“Louise’s story” encompasses majority of the film. Shot in several 360-degree pans, the camera follows the story of Louise, a mother who enters the workforce as a switchboard operator and momentarily joins a campaign to advocate for free childcare at workplaces, and extends the dialectical play on form and content. The camera starts in Louise’s kitchen, where she feeds her daughter and starts on breakfast, and steadily rotates in a circle around the room. The camera is relentless and not subjectively tied to any person or action. Mulvey writes, “But the mass of mainstream film… portray a hermetically sealed world that unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic fantasy” (485–486, emphasis added). The kitchen, as a stand-in for the middle-class home, is in of itself a hermetically sealed world impenetrable and foreign to the working father, who briefly makes an appearance only by the kitchen door. “Unwinds magically” is an apt description of this world for the mother, whose positionality and acts of domesticity are incapable of claiming the camera’s agency and mobility for herself.
The form — panoramic shots — and the content — Louise’s domesticity — cannot be read alone. Read together, the shots problematize the humanist subject and criticize the magical unwinding of history and cinematic narratives that occur without or despite the will of women. Despite the different versions of humanism that have developed throughout time and regions, the humanist subject is still often described as, universally, having agency — e.g., Sartre’s infamous “existence precedes essence” claim. Meanwhile, in the film world, the woman is often “tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning” while consequentially assuming the role of a passive image supporting “the man’s role as the active one of forwarding the story, making things happen” (484, 488). Further, this critique that, for women, the self is not the sole author of the film world and — let alone — history reiterates the questions, does feminist film theory need humanism in its practice, or counter-cinema?
Mulvey and Wollen complicate the humanist critique with an attention to Marxist or socialist politics. Specifically on the question of unpaid domestic labor, which deserves the attention of Marxist humanists interested not just in the annulment of private property, but also the unification of the individual within the collective as the “inequality of rights in relationships between the sexes” and treatment of women as private property contradict the interests of Marxist humanists and the working class (Kollontai, 289). Meanwhile, while class consciousness is integral to the becoming of man as human for Marxist humanists, the process of becoming the object of sensuous awareness, of finding an out to mass alienation, and of finding collectivity based on the universal human condition is contingent on women being a part of such a class and (unpaid) domestic work being considered “productive.”
There emerges a dualism between productivity and reproductivity that function in a similar way to the public / private binary, which might be thought of as, actually, dialectically intertwined. In Louise’s workplace, women are still performing “domestic” tasks, such as cooking, serving, and cleaning the cafeteria. Only this time they do so for a wage, which begs the question, does domestic labor, in its delegitimized form, deserve to be wage labor? And, in leaving the kitchen and demanding a place in the workplace, what kind of “rights” are Louise and other women claiming — as both intrinsic to their humanity and desired by their womanhood?
If the humanist self is “a disembody- ied and unitary category whose rights are guaranteed as natural or intrinsic,” then the framing of wage labor and the merging of the domestic and productive spheres as a “right” transforms liberal humanism (Ahmed, 74). It does so by, firstly, positing the working woman as the contradiction to the humanist self with intrinsic rights and as “an elastic and indeterminate entity whose interiority can expand or contract depending on its power to exercise its rights in an institutional context…” (75). Secondly, according to Iris Marian Young, “Rights are relationships not things; they are institutionally defined rules specifying what people can do in relation to one another,” and, so, the humanist self, including women, do not exist in a vacuum; the expanding identity and humanity of working women are dependent on others and institutions that may name their rights (74). This is problematic because it contradicts the idea of a universal human condition and cannot be “reconciled into universal (his)tory of “man” as a subject who translates across narratives” (88).
The film also articulates doubt that a universal human condition even exists as an intertext reads, “wants women to work, even needs them to, but denies them the facilities and often seems to be punishing them for leaving their proper place” (Mulvey and Wollen, 33:27). Still, “proper place” seems to be expanding with first-wave feminism. As the camera pans Louise’s workplace, the cafeteria, the playground, etc. it’s clear that these spaces, although “public,” are places for labor dedicated to and dominated by women. While these places are incredibly divided, the film calls attention to the fact that women’s “condition” and spaces are based on cultural conditioning and evolving outside of the “collective,” “restoring to rights talk, and the struggle for equitable conditions, the realm of historically situated and bodily experience” (Ahmed, 75).
The next section “Acrobats” contains high contrast and colorfully saturated images of women juggling, climbing, bending, etc. The various colors outline their silhouettes, but do not sexualize them nor do they obstruct our view of their movement. Their movement is contained, as if their flexibility presents an image of women ready to be mobile, tumble into the next historical era, and climb out of our screens to become fully human. It’s unexpectedly optimistic and sympathetic to the humanist project.
“Laura listening” evokes a feeling of alienation. Laura’s voice on the tape is foreign to her as if the lecture she had put out into the world — her product — is no longer hers and “This scene acknowledges that our words as well as our images are never entirely our own, and it is their estrangement from us that makes them both ugly and seductive at the same time” (Esche, 124). Further, the experience of watching Laura listening to herself is tedious and uneasy; the audience is forced to scrutinize Laura’s awkward fidgeting and scribbling. But, as Buck-Morss had reminded us about her own writing, the return to Laura at this point in the film is indicative of how history may collapse onto itself and how its circularity undercuts the linear diegesis of traditional cinema.
Finally, the “Puzzle ending” of two globules of mercury being steered to the center of a maze game “may suggest the recognition of a possible re-[centering] of the subject or a coming together of male and female…” (124). While “Gayatri Spivak suggests that the centering of the subject is irreducible and inevitable,” the puzzle ending suggests that this centering is difficult and near impossible (Ahmed, 73).
What, then, is feminist film theory and Riddles of the Sphinx suggesting is the humanist subject and — in practice — why might feminist counter-cinema need to identify with a humanist self? According to Lea Melandri, “Woman enters history having already lost concreteness and singularity: she is the economic machine that reproduces the human species, and she is the Mother, an equivalent more universal than money, the most abstract measure ever invented by patriarchal ideology” (de Lauretis, 320). What’s interesting about Melandri’s language is that’s she’s inverting the critique of capitalist alienation and of male-dominated humanism and reappropriating the economic and humanist language to place women in the position of power over men, but not quite liberating the critique itself.
When it comes to film and the female spectator, “identification is “not simply one psychical mechanism among others, but the operation itself whereby the human subject is constituted”… then it must be all the more important, theoretically and politically, for women who have never before represented ourselves as subjects, and whose images and subjectivities — until very recently, if at all — have not been ours to shape, to portray, or to create” (319–320). Based on this analysis, the humanist subject in feminist counter-film is not universally known, but actively created through engagement with film, identification, and — to Spencer’s earlier point — even an othering. We might even think of this active identification as a “creation/production over essence” claim along the lines of Sartre’s “Existentialism is a Humanism.” These are the practical applications of humanism in counter-cinema, along with the theoretical ideal of becoming the makers of meaning in the film world.
If we were to accept that the human subject is male, unified, and autonomous, the avant-garde genre, to which Riddles of the Sphinx belongs, may be a more ethical engagement with cinema. “As in the originary distinction of classic myth reaching us through the Platonic tradition, human creation and all that is human — mine, spirit, history, language, art, or symbolic capacity — is defined in contradistinction to formless chaos, phusis or nature, to something that is female, matrix and matter…” (320). Feminist counter-cinema would then be an embrace of the absurd, the external, and the elasticity of identity. But, yet again and like Melandri, the “Woman,” and her history in opposition to “Man,” is just an other.
History is, therefore, not an objective truth, but an experience, and this claim is not mutually exclusive to a Marxist humanist perspective and feminist counter-cinema may even benefit from such a perspective in terms of intersectionality. Donna Haraway goes as far as to say, “There is nothing about being ‘female’ that naturally binds women” and, thus, considering that identity is historically and culturally situated — an experience — , an insistence of the “female experience” against the grain of Marxist humanism in counter-cinema may just be essentialist and violently ignorant in of itself. Ahmed asks, “Doesn’t this very notion of “representing women” assume that there are “women” and that they can be represented, and doesn’t it therefore pre- suppose humanism as a politics of identity?” to which feminism should be articulated as being committed to difference and collectivity; “The problem of assuming woman as an essential and foundational category is precisely that this assumption works to exclude a pragmatic analysis of the complex and difficult intersections that trouble as well as shape subject positions” (75–76). As thinkers like bell hooks, in coining the term oppositional gaze for Black women in response to Mulvey’s work, and CLR James, in situating Black history into American history, have shown, non-white women certainly have the right to redefine Marxist humanism for themselves.
I don’t believe Mulvey and Wollen are attempting to abandon Marxist humanism for a post-structuralist framework nor are they presupposing and recommending a female unity. Ultimately, their argument doesn’t end with critique, but an optimistic compromise, in which Riddles of the Sphinx recognizes that should feminism be a philosophy of action, Marxist humanism and its doctrine of self-determination and movement should not be its character, but its goal — because, within Marxist humanism, the body is still mutable and creative self-direction and self-advocacy is limitless.
Ahmed, Sara. “Beyond Humanism and Postmodernism: Theorizing a Feminist Practice.” Hypatia, vol. 11, no. 2, spring 1996, pp. 71–93, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3810265?seq=21.
Buck-Morss, Susan. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. The MIT Press, 2000.
De Lauretis, Teresa. “Rethinking Women’s Cinema: Aesthetics and Feminist Theory .” Film and Theory: An Anthology, edited by Robert Stam and Toby Miller, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, UK, 2000, pp. 317–336.
Esche, Charles. “What Does It Mean to Say That Feminism Is Back? A Reaction to Riddles of the Sphinx.” Afterall, vol. 15, spring 2007, pp. 119–125, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1086/aft.15.20711647.
Kollontai, Alexandra. “Make Way for Winged Eros: A Letter to Working Youth.” Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai, translated by Alix Holt, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, NY, 1980, pp. 276–292.
Mulvey , Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film and Theory: An Anthology, edited by Robert Stam and Toby Miller, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, UK, 2000, pp. 483–494.
Mulvey, Laura and Peter Wollen, directors. Riddles of the Sphinx. Amazon Prime Video, https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/amzn1.dv.gti.3885d3eb-793b-4c14-b939-6f568fe01702?autoplay=0&ref_=atv_cf_strg_wb. Accessed 2023.
Spencer, Robert, and Robert Spencer. “Postcolonialism Is a Humanism.” For Humanism : Explorations in Theory and Politics, edited by David Alderson, Pluto Press, London, UK, 2017, pp. 120–162.
