Riddles of the Sphinx
The camera pans throughout the various domestic environments inhabited by Louise – including Malcolm LeGrice’s kitchen and Stephen Dwoskin’s bedroom – interrupted by Laura Mulvey reading the story of Oedipus encountering the Sphinx. Perhaps more than the subject matter, co-directors Mulvey and Peter Wollen are applying lessons from Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema” to the domestic: “Although the film is really being shown, is there to be seen, conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectre the illusions of looking in on a private world.”