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ing literature or poetry or making movies is to be more daring; you can push against the boundaries of theoretical correctness. This, perhaps, is how culture can change. You're not really going to
move
people by writing theory. If you want to
move
people, you can't always have correctness hanging over you like the sword of Damocles. When
Riddles
first came out, it was shown at the Other Cinema for two weeks. There were some very good discussions organized around it on the weekends. I don't think the question of essentialism came up in those first discussions, but later.
[
Wollen:
We also got criticized for casting a black actress as Maxine. We thought we were simply giving the part to a black actress, Merdelle Jordine, whose work we both admired. Of course, we were also aware of how difficult it was for black actresses to get parts, as a result of discrimination and stereotyping, and we wanted to do something toward breaking down that kind of prejudice.]
MacDonald:
How did you and Peter divide up the work of making
Riddles
?
Mulvey:
We tried to get everything possible organized beforehand and leave the narrowest margin for decision during the actual shooting. We worked things out endlessly on charts when we were thinking about the film. Later, when we were working on films where the collaboration was much more difficult, we thought about how avant-garde strategies, like those we used in
Riddles,
enable collaboration, because once we had determined a fixed, formal system, all we had to do was organize all the elements around the formal system. We could decide an enormous amount in advance.
We spent a really, really long time talking
Riddles
through. And all of that was completely both of us together. I don't think one could say that one thing came from Peter or me, rather than the other. There
was
a shift in responsibility in the writing. We collaborated on the voice "off" over the first three sequences, in the sense that although in the end Peter composed the text we both together collected the key words, making arbitrary associations and collecting a vocabulary. Then Peter arranged them as poems, but I was always looking and making suggestions. The last two sequencesthe mirror sequence and the British Museum sequencewere written completely by Peter. I might have done a little editing. I think the voice-over in the British Museum sequence, in particular, is an astounding piece of writing. I've been working on the myth of Pandora and the box in recent months, and I find I'm thinking about things
now
that were already there in the British Museum voice-over. It continues to set off resonances for me. I think it is very brilliant, perhaps particularly the way Peter creates a fragmentation of subjectivity. The "she" shifts around and you realize that the voice represents the child's