The current rush to recall, and even re-stage, first-wave feminism in the art world is at least gratifying. Yet it is also somewhat tragic that it has taken until recently to remember what we chose to forget so deliberately over twenty years before.

To help to understand why feminism is again suddenly in vogue, it is probably essential to think through what caused it slip out of fashionable art discourse for the last decades. A common (male) assessment is that women themselves lost faith in feminism, or got bored with 'banging on' about their rights and oppression - and that legislation across the western world in the 1970s had ensured that sexism was illegal, so the battles were won. In this light, men could act as they wanted - secure that, whatever their behaviour, they had already been made fully aware of the oppressions of patriarchy and therefore could not possibly be guilty of the same offences as their fathers.

In thinking over this history, it is instructive to look at works from that time and discover their power to provoke questions about contemporary gender relations. Interesting too is to assess how these works might continue to provoke and seduce in the light of a different, contemporary relationship to the image - the image of woman certainly, but also images in general. Many of the feminist works of the 1970s and early 80s were made in the context of a dizzying vortex of critical and aesthetic engagements that brought together critical theory, structuralist reduction and an iconoclast tendency that suggested that images had to be, in the language of the time, 'put under erasure' - or at the very least could not be allowed to 'stand alone', so were often subjected to textual overlays. A key example from this time is Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's Riddles of the Sphinx, made in London in 1977 towards the end of the first feminist wave. This 92-minute film, shot on 16mm and featuring Mulvey and Wollen's son Chad as well as a number of actors, was for many years considered to be one of the most significant avant-garde films of the period, both for its feminism and, more generally, for its critical relationship to the filmic image. Riddles of the Sphinx is as well a period piece in a literal sense, and it is easy to recognise in it some important characters from the British feminist film and art milieu of the time - Tina Keane, Claire Johnston and, most notably, Mary Kelly.

The film is divided into seven unequal sections that present a set of arguments about women's unrealised potential within a patriarchal system. Throughout these sections, a considerable variety of formal and technical devices are deployed, with two predominant - slow 360 degree pans and rostrum camera work on a variety of archival, filmic and photographic images. The main allegorical trope of the title is introduced in the first two sequences. The film opens with a quote from Gertrud Stein - 'a narrative of what wishes what it wishes to be' - shown over the pages of a French magazine article entitled 'La mythe de la femme', and depicting various stereotypical poses of woman. The pages are turned until they rest on an image of Greta Garbo's face superimposed on the Egyptian Sphinx at Giza. This image holds and disappears abruptly to open on a frontal image of Laura Mulvey herself, sitting behind a desk delivering an academic text on the story of the Sphinx in Greek and Egyptian mythology. The authority of the lecture is undermined, or made personally significant, by Mulvey's charming nervousness coupled with our knowledge that the filmmaker is sitting in front of the camera, putting herself through an apparent ordeal and thus turning her authorial voice into a hesitating and rather edgy, self-conscious performance. As she speaks, Mulvey plays nervously with her pencil or pen, repeatedly looking away from the camera and down towards her hands. She has an open script in front of her that she occasionally glances at. Next to the script is a tiny blue-and-yellow globe and a coffee cup. Her 'lecture' centres on the Sphinx as a monstrous image that has the power to kill if its riddle is not successfully answered, yet on the screen is an attractive young woman whose charm and nervousness seem less dangerous than mysterious, even seductive - a perfect foil for the image of the Sphinx? Or perhaps its complement?

The lecture establishes the gender difference of Greek and Egyptian Sphinxes and locates the Greek Sphinx as an allegory of the power relations between men and women. The Greek Sphinx, having already devoured many men who failed to answer her riddle correctly, chooses to commit suicide when Oedipus finally answers her. While her willingness to choose death rather than submit to patriarchy is portrayed as a noble gesture, the essentially male fantasy at the basis of the myth is explained as originating in the terrifyingly unknowable (yet erotic) secrets of a woman as she appears to the minds of men. In a beautiful turn of phrase, Mulvey transposes male fears to women's reality, stating at the end of this section that 'the Sphinx, as woman, is a threat and a riddle, but women within patriarchy are faced with a never-ending series of threats and riddles. Dilemmas which are hard for women to solve because the culture in which they must think is not theirs.' Her manner of delivery adds self-consciousness to what is otherwise a very definitive statement.

The section that follows her lecture uses what seems to be re-filmed footage of the temples at Giza, and ends with a zoom in on the weather-battered mouth of the Sphinx, as though to try to hear her riddle, or get as literally close to the source as possible. The visual style Mulvey and Wollen adopt in this section focuses on the physical nature of the film material. But, unlike most of the work of structuralist and other avant-garde filmmakers from the UK at the time, the form and content of the film is never determined exclusively by production processes. Riddles of the Sphinx is not only a film about filmmaking or the materiality of celluloid, but one that also insists upon 'the fact' of women and their marginalised place in contemporary society. Formal devices are deployed in collaboration with contents that emerge in inventive and imaginative ways, revealing contradiction and beauty in a complex osmosis. And so the abstract images that result from the close-up on the Sphinx's mouth are as much an exercise of visual experimentation as an allegory for the Sphinx's silence - or our inability to make sense of her voice. Similarly, the extraordinary sequence of acrobats towards the end of the film, in which primary colours saturate the screen and construct a stage for the acrobats' silhouettes, is not just an study of colour, form and composition, but also a suggestion of 'flexibility' that, like the Sphinx's riddles, offers an image of women's position within the social space.

The core of Riddles of the Sphinx is a series of thirteen full 360-degree pans, in most cases filmed from a static camera position, around a single location. Each pan is located in a different urban context and each reveals more about the biography of the main character, Louise, as they follow one another. The story starts in the kitchen, where a mother prepares food for a child and a husband. Here, the pivotal nature of the relationships are established. The camera itself moves slowly and regularly, at first clockwise, then anti-clockwise, never pausing to examine one object more than any other. The relentless movement of the camera, together with the circular repetition and progression (from private to public spaces), echoes the strategies of the minimalist music that is used as soundtrack. Like in Terry Riley's or Steve Reich's compositions, the language is to some extent mechanical (the camera's eye is not human, it records without emotion), but the effect of the repetition is hypnotic and, ultimately, transcendent. The camera's inability to focus - its apparent lack of intentionality - also works in this direction. Rather than defined by a subjective position, it becomes an empty centre that opens the doors to alternative types of engagement. The woman's face itself is never seen in these early sequences. Her identity is confirmed only later, while initially it is the child and then the husband who claim recognition. Again, her presence is conditioned by others rather than by her sovereign self. The music soundtrack is usually overlaid with a voiceover that varies from direct speech to more suggestive or even directly political statements, representing an internal dialogue in Louise's mind and/or an external commentator on her position - an ambivalence that recalls the ambiguity of Mulvey's performed lecture earlier. As each of the thirteen single-shot pans uncurls, the focus of the woman's life is presented. First we see her in different domestic situations, struggling and eventually abandoning a failed relationship with the husband and father (himself a filmmaker). Her work in a telephone exchange becomes a site for more social contact and direct political action. At one stage, the woman argues with her fellow employees over the need for crèche facilities and understanding for the entirely female workforce, while at another she secretly uses the telephone to make a private call - bringing together for a moment her two worlds. The all-too-civilised nature of the couple's separation - the man's diffident departure, the meeting when Louise tells him of her decision to sell the house - is painfully well played and dramatically effective. It emphasises once again the tension between public appearance and private emotion that resonates through this central section, and repeatedly calls to mind the dilemma of women acting in the 'culture which is not theirs' identified by Mulvey in her lecture.

The final sections of the film comment on and refer back to the sections before, unwinding the film and spooling it back to the start in recognition, we might imagine, of the effect of the 360-degree pan technique itself. The most striking visual sequence now follows, with footage of female acrobats to which Mulvey and Wollen have given various camera treatments of colour saturation, flaring, etc. What is compelling is not only the formal games with the camera, but the freedom and confidence in their bodies that these acrobats exhibit. Here we have women behaving uninhibitedly, but not as sexualised creatures for a male gaze. They are skilled, practiced, trained and in control, not waiting for salvation from external bodies - they are jugglers, able to maintain things in balance, as precarious as this may be.

The film then returns to Mulvey, who is now listening to her own recorded voice. The experience of hearing your own voice is a strangely alienating one - it sounds close to you, but it speaks your words in a way that suggests that they are spoken by someone else, as if your words had been robbed a little or denuded by a foreign presence inside of them. This scene acknowledges that our words as well as our images are never entirely our own, and it is their estrangement from us that makes them both ugly and seductive at the same time. Mulvey, while listening to her own voice, briefly brings pen to her notebook, but interestingly, rather than writing words, she seems to make a series of random marks that remain invisible to the viewer.

The film finally ends with a close up of a children's game in which two globules of mercury are steered with difficulty through a blue plastic maze until both join in the middle. This final sequence may suggest the recognition of a possible re-centring of the subject or a coming together of male and female, but the image of the little maze still gives us a very ambiguous visual form as a conclusion. We know that these puzzles are often 'almost impossible' and that the conjoining of the mercury is only a temporary and certainly unstable event - one microscopic shift in any direction, left or right, up or down, and the equilibrium and cohesion is broken; part of the newly formed object will start to leave the heart of the maze, unable to take its whole self with itself and now two or more objects will begin again the precarious chase and repulsion through the structure.

The image of temporary equilibrium at the heart of the maze that is the final image of the film simultaneously conjures up the impending iconoclasm of its opposite condition. This is the compelling and disappointing consequence of the game: an image that can never produce a complete, stable meaning, an image that is a riddle that no one can ever answer. Do women really crave such unity? Is patriarchy really so exclusive? Isn't pleasure based on antagonistic desire? The image of the maze seems to suggest that the heart of the story is not the solving of the enigma, but rather the inevitable and repetitive staging of a new form of the same. Every image is unstable and alienating, but not because it is a false version of a genuine form. Like the sound of your recorded voice, it is close but never the same, it is always in some way unrecognisable, stolen, belonging to someone else. The literal beauty of the film's two very different closing images (Mulvey listening to recorded voices and mercury in the plastic maze) is the only thing we can really be sure of. Mulvey's hand is holding her pen, hovering over the page as she listens to her own alienated voice. And the marks that she finally makes are precisely not words at all.

*

A few years before making Riddles of the Sphinx, Mulvey wrote one of her key texts, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'. In it, she seeks to define the nature of the male gaze in cinema:

This article will discuss the interweaving of [...] erotic pleasure in film,

its meaning and, in particular, the central place of the image of woman. It

is said that analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention

of this article.¹

In that tone familiar from feminist texts of the time (and now somewhat stylised to our ears), Mulvey's words clearly set out an agenda that is pursued in the film, one that displaces the centre and uses a consistent structural analysis to demand a high level of attention and critical perception of the viewer. But the pursuing of that agenda is done through language and techniques that manage to analyse pleasure and beauty without actually destroying them. This balance, perfectly embodied perhaps by the images of acrobats, but present throughout the whole film, is why it seems worthwhile to pay close attention to Riddles of the Sphinx in detail. However, its significance for us also lies in how we are able to consider it today.

Thirty years on, the depiction of an average female life in Western Europe seems little changed. Social and personal pressures are remarkably similar despite the waning of feminism as a topic and the unarguable cultural and legislative improvements that have occurred. At this moment, the achievements of those days are being reviewed by the art world in a spirit as much of nostalgia as criticality. This film, and other works from its time, asks us to reconsider the intervening period. What was the effect of the conservative reaction and the reassertion of male painterly genius in the 1980s? How do the anti-ideological and formless practices of 1990s relational art answer the charges brought up in this film? If both are found lacking in terms of the challenges this film defines, does the renewed interest in feminism foreshadow a more widespread return to the less amenable or uncompromising choices that artists and writers who chose to present themselves as politically engaged necessarily had to make? Or, to be more cynical, is it simply an attempt to open up an unplundered market for art production of the past, a commercial imperative masked by a new aesthetic interest in works from before the art market exploded? It is in answer to these questions over the next couple of years that the real legacy of a work like Riddles of the Sphinx may be judged. At this stage, it appears today as a film of great personal courage and integrity; it outlines a potential relationship between the political, the aesthetic and the narrative while resonating with many current and ongoing dilemmas.

— Charles Esche