On the occasion of Laura Mulvey becoming a BFI Fellow in December 2025, Club Des Femmes decided to share our memories of Laura, who has been a friend des femmes and inspiration for our curation! So and Selina made a short video for the BFI event, but it was edited down – you can watch the full version with subtitles below, followed by visual and written tributes from CDF, and a special video tribute from Sarah Wood.
Jenny Clarke says:
Helen de Witt says:
While I was studying art history and philosophy at the University of Essex, I was introduced to feminist psychoanalytic theory by the wonderful Margaret Iversen, who set us Laura’s famous article to read. This changed my view of pretty much everything.
I first encountered Laura herself a year or so later at the Women’s Film Festival in Norwich. I have to admit that, in the mid-1980s when we had chips on both our shoulders and styled ourselves as gutter dwellers, Laura’s immaculate enunciation and diction came as something of a shock. Once I settled back into my seat and really listened, I began to feel the force of everything she was saying and meaning, and still do.
My next encounter came a couple of years later at a screening of Blue Velvet at the Rio Cinema in Dalston, with Laura and Mandy Merck leading the discussion afterwards. The film was controversial at the time, widely accused of misogyny, and several cinema staff had decided to picket the screening. That occasion remains to this day the only time I have ever crossed a picket line.
All those decades ago, I could never have imagined that I would one day work with Laura at Birkbeck. She was even the second marker for a module on Artists’ Film that I taught (no pressure!), and more than that, she offered me her office whenever I needed somewhere to work. Perhaps that is theory in practice….
So Mayer says:
How to choose my favourite encounter with Laura? After all, I spent the stunned and bewildered night after the Brexit vote with her and Lizzie Borden at the Edinburgh Film Festival, marvelling at the revival screening of Lizzie’s long-lost debut film Regrouping, and bonding over politics.
She was my podcast co-host Lee’s number #1 pick for a London-based guest on Hell is for Hyphenates, leading to a dazzling afternoon with the three of us in her office discussing Max Ophüls (and just a little on her love of Tom Hiddleston!). And, oh yes, I once gave a talk in her presence about the lesbian camera as dildo 😳
But the most memorable has to be spending an afternoon with her going through her careful edits of an essay I’d written on Riddles of the Sphinx, her absolute precision, her curiosity, her pleasure in layers of meaning, her memories, her rigorous but fair corrections to my hasty interpretations, and her justified pride in her filmmaking as it was reaching new generations.
Sarah Wood says (scroll down for Sarah’s film):
Dear Laura
Once a group of us were standing in the street in Bloomsbury at the end of a merry evening together. Before we went our separate ways you paused us, gesturing to the air above the traffic rumble, towards a sound beyond. We listened and behind the rumble, the peal of church bells ringing in the hour. Those are the bells Virginia Woolf heard every day, you said.
What a gift. A casual intervention that made us stop and remember to take notice. A moment that made this sometimes fragmented city coalesce via cultural resonance.
Now, in a time when dauntingly the word culture gets cynically linked to the word war, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the way you model the opposite.
From you I learn that –
Thought is action
Feminism is action
Collaboration is action
Dialogue is action
Education is action
Cinema is action
In an age when we need our visual wits about us, thank you for your revolutionising insight, your ever-renewing critical attention that simply makes the world we share, better.