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MacDonald:
The opening and closing sequences of
Riddles
are closer to the tradition of American avant-garde film than to the history of experimental narrative à la Godard. In Morgan Fisher's
Documentary Footage
[1967] a woman asks herself a series of questions, recording them on a tape recorder; she rewinds the tape recorder, then answers the questionsall in a single, continuous shot. Section Two of
Riddles,
where you record your lecture on the sphinx, and Section Six, where you listen to that conversation, remind me of that film. Were the "frame" sections of
Riddles
allusions to particular films or filmmakers, or just to standard avant-garde procedures?
Mulvey:
I hadn't seen the Morgan Fisher film. Peter knew Morgan Fisher, I think, but I don't know if he'd seen the film. In the sphinx rephotography section (Section Three), we certainly had in mind American structural film and the importance of rephotography in that work. Probably, if there was a reference there, it would have been to Ken Jacobs's
Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son
[1969]. I'm not so sure where the acrobats came from, Eisenstein's montage of attractions, perhaps. That sequence was done by a lab; it was the one bit of the film that kept eluding our control. We didn't like a lot of things the lab did, but now I like the sequence more than I used to.
[
Wollen:
I thought of the "Sphinx" and "Acrobats" sequences as East Coast and West Coast, respectively. And yes, I had seen Morgan Fisher's film.]
MacDonald:
I was surprised when you said at Hamilton College that you hadn't seen
Riddles
in years, and hadn't really talked much about it.
Mulvey:
I hadn't seen it in I don't know how long. The film that I show and talk about a lot is
Amy!
It's only thirty minutes long.
MacDonald:
How did it feel to see
Riddles
again?
Mulvey:
Well, I still get anxious, but it felt much smoother than it used to. Right after we first made
Riddles,
Peter was in the United States, and I did a lecture tour that the British Film Institute had organized. In those days, there was a feeling that the difficult films of the seventies would be humanized by the director's appearance, and we had always thought of the film as having an agitational element, not only politically, but in that its experimental strategies should be discussed and explained. This was not to give the director's answer, or the author's privileged insight, but to give people a chance to talk about ideas and issues that were unfamiliar. Or, if they were familiar, to respond with their own ideas and reactions. This particular tour was around Southwest England. I showed the film at various colleges and film societies. Lots of quite unwitting people from small towns suddenly found themselves confronted with
Riddles of the Sphinx
. Well, that was anxiety-provoking. I did get an unusual sense of the shape of the film. Often, at