Riddles Of The Sphinx Mulvey

So you want to watch Riddles Of The Sphinx Mulvey

It's a 1977 short film by Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen. It runs about 53 minutes. The film is structured as a structuralist experiment that cuts between a fictional narrative about a middle-class housewife named Anna and a series of theoretical intertitles and documentary fragments. It's not an easy watch if you're looking for conventional storytelling. The whole point is that the form itself is the argument. The film is not widely licensed on mainstream streaming platforms. Your most reliable route is the BFI Player or the BFI catalog. Sometimes it appears through university film department channels, or on DVD as part of compilations like Laura Mulvey: Desire and the Female Gaze. If you search archives, you'll also run into video essays and lecture recordings that reference it, but those are not the same as the full film. I've had students try to piece together the experience from fragments and it doesn't work—the theoretical pieces only land when they sit next to the narrative beats. Mulvey and Wollen were working through psychoanalytic theory at the time. The film applies ideas from Lacan and Freud to examine female desire, castration anxiety, and the economics of looking. Anna's storyline follows a woman who is restless, emotionally adrift, and struggling with the constraints of her domestic situation. The intertitles and cutaways introduce concepts like the female masochistic contract, autoeroticism, and the split between visual pleasure and narrative drive. The film was made during a period when Mulvey was developing what would become her most famous essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," which came out the following year. You can see the groundwork laid out in real time here.

One thing people consistently miss is that this isn't a film about oppression alone. It's about how visual culture itself is structured around male desire, and how a woman might become aware of that structure. The narrative doesn't offer a neat resolution because the whole apparatus of classical cinema is being taken apart, not improved.

How to actually engage with it

Don't watch this like a regular movie. It demands a different mode of attention. I'd recommend watching it once straight through without stopping, then watching it a second time with the subtitles on so you can catch the intertitles properly. The text cards move fast and they carry a lot of the theoretical weight. If you miss one, the next scene might not make sense. Here's a practical approach that works better than passive viewing. Write down three questions before you start: How is the camera positioning the viewer? What does Anna want, and who gets to define it? Where does the film break its own rules? Keep a notebook open and note timestamps whenever the editing pattern shifts. The shifts are deliberate. They're not accidents of pacing.

Common mistakes people make with this film

The biggest one is treating Anna as a character study. She's not. She's a site where theoretical questions get performed. When people try to psychoanalyze her as if she were a real person, they miss the whole structural point. Another mistake is assuming the film is anti-female. It isn't. It's critical of a visual system that benefits certain kinds of subjects and excludes others. The distinction matters. I ran into this with a screening group last year. We had five people in the room who kept talking about Anna's choices as though the film was judging them. Afterward I had to pull up a passage from Mulvey's later writings where she explicitly addresses this misunderstanding. The film doesn't judge Anna. It judges the conditions that make her situation seem inevitable. That's a subtle but essential difference, and most first-time viewers blur it completely.

What the film gets wrong or where it stumbles

Let's be honest about the limitations. The film is dated in several ways. Some of the psychoanalytic framework feels rigid now. The class position of the protagonist is never examined critically, and the film essentially assumes that middle-class domestic dissatisfaction is a universal starting point, which it isn't. Mulvey herself acknowledged later that her early work didn't account for race, class, or sexual orientation in a meaningful way. That's not a flaw in the film so much as a reflection of its moment, but it's worth knowing before you treat this as a complete theoretical statement. If you're coming to this looking for a contemporary feminist film theory toolkit, you'll need to supplement it. Mulvey's later essays, particularly her work on Latin American cinema and her 1981 essay "Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,'" fill in a lot of the gaps. pair them together and you get a much sharper picture.

The practical takeaway

Riddles of the Sphinx is a demanding film, but it's also one of the most important documents of feminist film theory that exists. It's not meant to be entertaining in a conventional sense. It's meant to make you uncomfortable with the way you're watching. If you leave the screening feeling confused or slightly frustrated, that's closer to the intended effect than if you leave feeling satisfied. The film is trying to retrain your instincts about looking, not give you something pleasurable to look at.