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Louise (Dinah Stabb) and Maxine (Merdelle Jordine) look at old photographs
while Louise's mother cares for Anna, in Mulvey and Wollen's
Riddles of the
Sphinx
(1977). By permission of the British Film Institute.
age a nonpatriarchal Law, rather than trying to escape from the patriarchal Law by retreating back into the pre-oedipal (the "Imaginary" in Lacan's terms), the dyadic relationship between infant and mother. This psychoanalytic approach to the mother-child relationship is also what relates the film to Mary Kelly's
Post-Partum Document,
part of which we use in the editing room sequences.]
Mulvey:
Historically speaking, just after
Riddles
came out, the psychoanalytic feminist world got very preoccupied with the question of essentialism, and because
Riddles
focused on mothers and daughters, on pre-oedipality, on the sphinx, and so on, it got very much tarred with the essentialist brush, which I think was unfair. The French feminists, like Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva, had been interested in exploring and analyzing the mother-daughter relationship in the pre-oedipal stage, within a feminist politics of psychoanalysis. They've been criticized for valorizing this sphere of the feminine pre-oedipal. Anyway, it was a complicated time, and
Riddles
seemed to come into the middle of it all, and was seen as an essentialist film. I thought that was also theoretically unfair from another point of view. While one could perfectly well write "correct theory" in articles, journals, lectures, one of the points of writ-