Laura Mulvey, the film theorist and filmmaker best known for her seminal essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, will be awarded a BFI Fellowship.
Mulvey will be handed the award at BFI Southbank on 4 November. She will also take part in an In Conversation event. At the same time, BFI Southbank will also mount a rep season of her work titled Laura Mulvey: Thinking Through Film. It will run at BFI Southbank throughout November and December.
Mulvey is currently Honorary Professor of Film at the University of St Andrews and Emerita Professor of Film and Media Studies and Fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London. She was the founding Director of Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI) from 2012 to 2015. She previously taught at the University of East Anglia and the BFI. In the 1990s, Mulvey was the Course Director of the transformational BFI MA partnership with Birkbeck College.
She is the author of the BFI Film Classic on Citizen Kane (1992) and Fetishism and Curiosity (1996, BFI Publishing); Visual and Other Pleasures (1989); Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006); and Afterimages: On Cinema, Women and Changing Times (2019). She has co-edited British Experimental Television (2007); Feminisms (2015); and Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and British Experimental Film in the 1970s (2017).
2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. The essay is one of the most influential pieces of writing on cinema and is still used in classrooms today to introduce students to feminist film theory. The essay popularized the concept of the male gaze, classical Hollywood cinema’s propensity to address, embody, and shape film spectators as heterosexual and male.
“We’re thrilled to honour Laura Mulvey with the BFI Fellowship,” BFI Chair Jay Hunt said in a statement. “For fifty years, she has changed how we watch and understand film. A British pioneer and feminist icon, her ideas and films have helped shape cinema and influenced the world. Marking this anniversary, the BFI—Britain’s home for film—is the right place to celebrate her legacy and inspire what comes next.”
Previous BFI Fellowship honorees include 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 and, most recently, Tilda Swinton, Barbara Broccoli, Michael G Wilson, Spike Lee, Christopher Nolan and Tom Cruise.
The post Laura Mulvey To Receive BFI Fellowship appeared first on Deadline.
