Riddles of the Sphinx

Kimberly Lamm has published a book devoted to the feminist avant-garde film Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) in the British Film Institute’s “Film Classics” series. Written and directed by Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, Riddles of the Sphinx follows the life of Louise (played by Dinah Stabb), a white middle-class woman living in London in the 1970s. With a kaleidoscopic array of cinematic techniques and poetic devices, the film charts Louise’s process of slowly rewriting her place within white patriarchal culture and connecting her voice to the Women’s Liberation Movement. Widely regarded as a classic work of feminist cinema, Riddles is today celebrated as one of the most important avant-garde films to emerge from Britain in the 1970s.

Lamm’s study of this intricate film explores how it utilizes language to challenge Hollywood’s dominant images of women and portray maternal care as a valued form of work, full of aesthetic pleasures and feminist possibilities. Lamm also delves into the context of the film's production and reception, highlighting its significance as the second collaboration between Mulvey and Wollen that realizes Wollen’s influential arguments about ‘counter-cinema’ and Mulvey's well-known manifesto on ‘the male gaze.’

Drawing on new scholarship in film studies, Lamm reads Riddles as an essay film, analysing how the directors work with voice, sound, and writing to address viewers and destabilize the habitual viewing practices that make the subordination of femininity appear natural. She demonstrates how the haunting, eerie score, composed by Mike Ratledge of Soft Machine, pulses with the sounds of what has yet to be said, making it central to that destabilization. Examining the voice of the Sphinx and connecting it to feminism’s engagement with psychoanalysis, Lamm argues that Mulvey and Wollen’s film works-through long histories of patriarchal viewing practices and creates conditions in which the full range of women’s voices can be listened to, heard, and valued.