The BFI will also present an accompanying season devoted to the career of the filmmaker, author, theorist and academic.
It has been announced that the BFI will present filmaker Laura Mulvey with the BFI Fellowship this November alongside a special In Conversation event, sharing thoughts about her relationship to cinema through her extensive writing and as a filmmaker, as much a conversation about ideas, now, and in the future, as it is a look back at Mulvey’s influential work.
In addition an accompanying season at BFI Southbank, Laura Mulvey: Thinking Through Film will also take place throughout November and December. It will feature aBFI Player collection and BFI educational events, season discussions and talks. A themed subscription collection and the premiere of a new video essay by Mulvey, commissioned by the BFI, will also be on BFI Player.
The BFI Fellowship celebrates 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.
She is best known as the author of the seminal essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, which this year marks its fiftieth anniversary, while also being a significant, generous presence in international independent film culture; influencing filmmakers, critics, writers, academics and educating generations of film students.
Talking about the news, Mulvey said: “This extraordinary honour moves me deeply, not least because it recognises film education, an original BFI commitment in 1933, through its first Fellowship to an academic. My work has always been collective. If my 1975 essay helped transform film studies, it was because the feminist movement was riding a wave of political energy that demanded new ways of seeing. Peter Wollen and I translated theory into practice and the BFI courageously supported our films when such experiments seemed impossibly radical. Teaching has been the crucial means to ensure that each generation discovers its own critical voice and establishes its own practice.
“I am so grateful to the BFI for recognising all three dimensions of this journey—scholarship, cinema, and education—and for affirming that film studies matter. This Fellowship belongs to everyone who believes critical thinking about images can change how we see ourselves and each other.”
She is currently Honorary Professor of Film at University of St Andrews and Emerita Professor of Film and Media Studies and Fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London. In addition she was the founding Director of Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI) from 2012 to 2015. She previously taught at University of East Anglia and the BFI. In the 1990s Mulvey was the Course Director of the transformational BFI MA partnership with Birkbeck College, with an emphasis on work experience with placements across all key BFI departments. This influenced the BFI’s advocacy for education about film and its impact on society. The film curating MA programme continued at Birkbeck in the 2000s, training a new generation of curators. 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).
Among the other BFI Fellows are: 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.