Have you continued to make films? Nothing is listed in the Canyon Catalogue after 1974.
No. I made one or two more films in England;
[1974] and
[1974] are still distributed. I stayed in England instead of returning to the Art Institute because I was driven (that's definitely the word!) to seek teachers to help me develop some psychic capacities that had been surfacing. It was clear to me that something was happening to me, and I had to find out what to do with it, how to direct it more effectively.
In England I started working on a videotape series on unorthodox healing methods. I believed this would provide me with a kind of cover while I observed different teachers and their work. The third healer I interviewed was Dr. Thomas Maughan, a homeopathic doctor and Chief of the Ancient Order of Druids. He effortlessly lured me into the Order with some very tasty information about dreams and dreamwork.
Now I'm working a lot with dreams again. Personal movies. I have a call-in radio show on dreams in Honolulu, and I write a dream column. I'm still interested in basically the same thingfinding a convenient vehicle that makes it easy and exciting for people to explore and expand their own awareness. I think that has been my own lifetime script. Originally I thought my movies, and particularly
had that value. Now I guess you could say I'm working with other people to improve the scripts of their own inner dramas. You should hear some of the wild and hairy dreams that are called in to the radio show. By comparison
is pretty tame!
Laura Mulvey
What was the nature of the collaboration between you and Peter Wollen as you were developing
? I assume that both of you had been seeing conventional narrative film, as well as the reactions to it: the movement out of narrative convention by Godard and others who were questioning the politics of the commercial cinema, and the various approaches of avant-garde filmthe two 'schools' described in Peter's 'Two Avant-Gardes' [originally pub-
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lished in the December 1975
. 'The Two Avant-Gardes' is reprinted in Wollen,
(London: Verso, 1982), pp. 92104].
'Two Avant-Gardes' came before
as did my 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' [Mulvey's essay has been widely reprinted. It is included in her
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 1426]. In a way, the film developed out of those two texts. But we were also trying to edge toward an avant-garde aesthetics that wasn't a pure aesthetics of negation. In those days, you remember, the avant-garde thought it could remodel the cinema. I think we all really believed it would be possible [laughter]. Godard had talked about a return to zero. For Peter and me,
was our return to zero (these days I call it our 'scorched earth' film)a film that consciously denied spectators the usual pleasures of cinema. After that, we felt we could start to think about an aesthetic that didn't just get its signification from negation. We were still committed to an aesthetic that would negate the expected cinematic conventions, that would be surprising to spectators but could
give them a hold on the formal devices we were using, a formal sense of what was going on. We didn't want a system like Brakhage's, where the spectator is
fascinated
threatened. We were interested in trying to make a movie in which form and structure were clearly visible but which would also have a space for feeling and emotion, that would open up a cinematic meaning beyond dependence on negating the dominant cinema's conventions and inbred ways of seeing.
The theme of a mother and child seemed to offer the means of finding a 'beyond negation.' At the time, people were first becoming excited and fascinated by psychoanalytic theory. It offered a means of rethinking the world and its subjectivities in just the same way that we felt that we wanted to rethink cinema. We felt that by using psychoanalytic theory to analyze and investigate how subjectivity was constructed, how sexual difference signified in the social, it was possible to challenge its 'politics of the unconscious.' That was probably the grand aim of the film.
We weren't questioning oedipality. We weren't questioning Freud. We weren't questioning psychoanalysis. We were suggesting that
the oedipal could be symbolized differently, then perhaps the way in which it is inscribed in the social would be affected. The mother-child relationship has been so iconically and iconographically important in our society, without the space between the mother and child ever having been opened out. Traditionally, they're there as a unit, epitomized by the Virgin and Child, who necessarily close off and deny what the relationship means theoretically and also poetically and emotionally. And yet the mother-child relationship is one of the most important relationships
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people live through. Our poetry, our literature, our culture cannot
