Page 321
For Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen the conventional cinematic depiction of women (and its exploitation of the female body) required a very different tactic, a tactic that no one could construe as participating in the gender-problematic patterns they meant to confront. As Severson makes clear in her interview, the ideology that produced
Near the Big Chakra
did not necessarily determine the way in which audiences responded to it. She discusses more than one instance where men, seeing the film in what they assumed was a private situation, responded to the film in a manner counterproductive to what she had in mind. For Mulvey and Wollen, the issue was not the body itselfthough
Riddles of the Sphinx
certainly avoids conventionally erotic imagery of the female bodybut the many central dimensions of women's lives that are routinely ignored in the commercial cinema's dedication to women as the objects of romantic/erotic, heterosexual quests. For their second collaboration (their first was
Penthesilea
[1974], a feature on Amazons currently out of distribution), they decided to focus on motherhood and daughterhood as it is experienced just before and during the interruption of what has been a thoroughly symbiotic relationship, without at any point requiring that either mother or daughter appeal to the erotic desires of the man in the film or of the "male" in the audience.
The mother-daughter story is explored in the film's central narrative, entitled "Louise's Story Told in Thirteen Shots." This narrative is framed by three beginning sections (a close-up of hands paging through a book of mythic images of women; "Laura Speaking," a passage that intercuts between images of the Egyptian and Greek sphinxes and Mulvey reading a paper on the history of the sphinx; and "Stones," a montage of rephotographed imagery of the Egyptian Sphinx) and three ending sections, each of which "mirrors" the corresponding opening section (''Acrobats," a montage of optically printed images of a juggler, a tumbler, and a trapeze artistall women; "Laura Listening," where Mulvey rewinds and listens to a tape of her comments in "Laura Speaking"; and "Puzzle Ending," a long single-shot close-up of hands solving a maze game: it "mirrors" the maze of imagery of women revealed in the film's opening section). Louise's story is presented sequentially, in long continuous shots (the shortest is one minute, forty-two seconds; the longest, ten minutes, eight seconds), each is a 360-degree pan. Between each pair of 360-degree pans is a bit of intertext that expands on the story revealed in the pans. At the beginning we see Louise preparing breakfast for Anna, then in Anna's bedroom as Anna is going to sleep; in shot three, Chris, Louise's husband, moves out (his good-bye to her and Anna are the story's first synch sound); in shot four, Louise leaves Anna at day-care for the first time; in shot five, we see Louise at work at a telephone switchboard, and in shot six, at lunch with the other work-