Laura Mulvey receives BFI Fellowship from Sir Isaac Julien at BFI Southbank
This evening influential filmmaker, author, theorist and academic, Laura Mulvey received the BFI Fellowship at BFI Southbank at an event that included a career In Conversation, hosted by film critic and curator B. Ruby Rich.
The BFI Fellowship, the BFI’s highest honour, was presented to Laura by Sir Isaac Julien, a longtime friend and collaborator who has known Laura since the early 80s. The BFI Fellowship recognises Laura Mulvey’s multi-faceted achievements over the last fifty years and the huge global impact of her work, making numerous significant interventions into the development of film culture, theory and visual language through her groundbreaking writing and filmmaking and the concept of the Male Gaze as identified in her essential essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, which this year marks its fiftieth anniversary.
Guests in attendance with BFI Chief Executive Ben Roberts and Chair Jay Hunt included filmmakers Joanna Hogg (The Souvenir, The Eternal Daughter), Sally Potter (Orlando, The Party), Liz Karlsen and Stephen Woolley (Carol, The Crying Game), Rebecca O’Brien (I, Daniel Blake, The Old Oak), Mark Lewis (Disgraced Monuments) and artist/filmmaker Sarah Wood, plus a video tribute reel including contributions from director Todd Haynes (Carol, Far From Heaven), Mark Cousins (The Story of Film, The Eyes of Orson Welles) and writer/producer Isa Mazzei (How To Blow Up a Pipeline).
On receiving the BFI Fellowship Laura Mulvey said: i am really very, very touched and it’s an extremely important moment for me. I hardly know how to begin to say thank you to the BFI and the support throughout the BFI for this Fellowship. It is an extraordinary honour for me personally, for being so extraordinarily unexpected. Admiring the list of previous fellows, the names themselves were such a rich source of reverie, conjuring up amazing individual film histories as well as film history. Never for a moment did I think that I would ever join these names. As I see it, the addition of my name to this list has introduced a new category of filmic achievement, scholarship. I’m really thrilled and very grateful that it’s been recognised by the BFI, an institution that has over these years already nurtured and sustained so many aspects of scholarly and educational activities, so now in a sense the two have come together.”
On presenting the BFI Fellowship to Laura, Sir Isaac Julien said: “Laura’s influence is not only in the books and films, but in the classrooms, conversations, and ongoing intellectual gatherings she helped build. She was, and still is, the Virginia Woolf of film studies. Laura’s singular readings of the visual language of cinema don’t simply sit on the bookshelf—they live in the way we create, in the way we analyse images, and in the way we understand ourselves in relation to cinema and to the visual arts. Laura Mulvey is a pioneer of feminist film theory, yes. But she is also a generous collaborator, an educator, an artist, and a thinker whose work has continuously opened doors for others. She taught us that cinema is political, that theory can be exhilarating, and that looking — really looking — can change everything. Laura, thank you for the theory, for the films, for the teaching, for the conversations, it is a true privilege to celebrate you tonight.”
BFI Chair Jay Hunt said: “We all know how rare it is for a single idea to shift the entire debate, even rarer for an academic to coin a phrase that shapes a cultural conversation for decades. But that’s precisely what Laura’s work has done. I’ve seen women start to own their own narrative both in front of and behind the camera. I’ve seen women rise to the top of their professions and become global tastemakers. And behind every single one of those triumphs whether they realise it or not is the iconoclastic thinking of Laura Mulvey. Every single woman working in film and television owes her a debt of gratitude.”
The Laura Mulvey season, Laura Mulvey: Thinking Through Film continues at BFI Southbank and on BFI Player until the end of November, plus Laura Mulvey’s selection of Big Screen Classics playing at BFI Southbank through December. The December issue of Sight and Sound magazine, which is available now, features an extensive interview with Laura Mulvey www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound
Mulvey joins the distinguished ranks of other BFI Fellows including David Lean, Bette Davis, Akira Kurosawa, Ousmane Sembène, Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, Orson Welles, Thelma Schoonmaker, Derek Jarman, Martin Scorsese, Satyajit Ray, Yasujirō Ozu, Tilda Swinton, Dame Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett, Barbara Broccoli, Michael G Wilson and most recently Spike Lee, Sir Christopher Nolan and Tom Cruise.
