Laura Mulvey’s research covers feminist film theory, melodrama and world cinema, and the aesthetics of stillness in the moving image. Her most important work was her essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” published in 1975, detailing her application of psychoanalysis to support her argument that classical Hollywood cinema adopts a male-oriented spectatorship, a subject now opularized by the term “male gaze.”  

Mulvey is currently professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck. She has written and co-directed numerous arthouse films, the most recent being 23 August 2008, a short film about two Iraqi brothers living and working in Baghdad under the Saddam Hussein regime which we co-directed with Faysal Abdullah and Mark Lewis. Mulvey’s work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions at the Peltz Gallery based at Birkbeck’s School of Arts in Gordon Square.