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people live through. Our poetry, our literature, our culture cannot
speak
the mother-child relationship; it's as though its "feeling" is beyond formal expression. Psychoanalytic theory does provide a language and concepts to analyze it and begin to "speak" it. So although we felt, politically, that motherhood had been silenced and should be given cultural space and a means of expression, at the same time, we recognized the difficulty of doing so within the language of the patriarchy. It was a challenge. And that challenge was the starting point for the film. We wanted to bring together theory, the avant-garde, political aspiration, and this emotional, but uncolonized, experience of motherhood.
MacDonald:
To what extent did
Riddles of the Sphinx
grow out of your own direct experience?
Mulvey:
Of being a mother?
MacDonald:
Yes. I've always wondered to what degree Louise is based on Laura.
Mulvey:
She wasn't, really. While we were developing the idea for the film I was conscious of the close relationship between my sister and her two-year-old daughter. Chad, my son, was by that time a strapping seven-or eight-year-old, and when he was very little, I would leave him with my mother a lot. So Louise's leaving Anna with her mother, the second stage of her development,
was
much closer to my experience. My grandmother had taken care of me and my favorite first cousin, so I thought babies should be brought up by their grandmothers. My sister and her daughter are in the film, in the playground sequence. The little girl with the blonde hair in the same sequence is Dinah's two-year-old daughter, Georgia (Dinah plays Louise). Diane, the camerawoman, also had a two-year-old daughter, who plays Anna in the film. So there were all these two-year-old girls around!
[
Wollen:
My mother is in the film too. She plays the grandmother in the garden scene.]
Mulvey:
But I'd also been reading. Louise's story wasn't just based on observation. I'd read Maud Mannoni's account of the case history of a mother who refuses to abandon her child to the symbolic and tries to keep the child within the dyad. This is there to some extent, at the beginning of Louise's story: Anna is too big to be carried around and babied. We wanted to imply that she was being kept too long, artificially, within the pre-oedipal.
[
Wollen:
Maud Mannoni's books were very important. She's a child analyst, a Lacanian who later disagreed with Lacan when he began to emphasize his "mathemes" and topological diagrams. She stressed the importance of the positioning of each child within a system of "Law" (the "Symbolic" in Lacan's terms). The question that interested us was how the Law itself was constructed and whether it was possible to envis-