Laura Mulvey to receive a BFI Fellowship

The BFI is celebrating the influential filmmaker, author, theorist and academic Laura Mulvey with its highest honour, a BFI Fellowship, and an accompanying season at BFI Southbank, Laura Mulvey: Thinking Through Film, a BFI Player collection and BFI educational events, season discussions and talks. 

The BFI Fellowship honours Mulvey’s multi-faceted achievements over the last 50 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. Best known as the author of the seminal essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, which this year marks its 50th anniversary, Mulvey has also been a significant, generous presence in international independent film culture; influencing filmmakers, critics, writers, academics and educating generations of film students. Her inquisitive eye has seen her cast her own gaze on everything from classical Hollywood, world cinema, the avant-garde and more.

The BFI Fellowship will be bestowed to Mulvey at BFI Southbank on 4 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. As Mulvey receives this honour, a BFI Southbank season - Laura Mulvey: Thinking Through Film, will take place throughout November and December, celebrating her long and illustrious career as a scholar, filmmaker and programmer alongside a themed subscription collection and premiere of a new video essay by Mulvey, commissioned by the BFI on BFI Player.

Says Mulvey, “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.”

BFI Chair Jay Hunt said “We’re thrilled to honour Laura Mulvey with the BFI Fellowship. For 50 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.”

Filmmaker Joanna Hogg (The Souvenir, The Eternal Daughter) said, “Laura Mulvey’s films and her ideas about cinema have helped shape not only how I see film, but how I see the world. Her influential work both as a filmmaker and an academic, has given many of us the courage to explore our own voices and the confidence to discuss complex issues. I am deeply pleased the BFI is honouring Laura with the BFI Fellowship; a recognition that feels both fitting and overdue. I hope it compels a new generation, not only of filmmakers and film thinkers but many others too, to engage with the power and brilliance of her work. She has made an indelible mark on cinema and thinking and undoubtedly changed the landscape for women.”

A towering presence in debates surrounding independent cinema, gender and psychoanalysis in film, classical Hollywood and more, 2025 marks the 50th anniversary since the publication of Mulvey’s essential essay, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ which has been used by countless scholars across the globe since to introduce students to feminist film theory and particularly the groundbreaking concept of the ‘male gaze’, highlighting classical Hollywood cinema’s propensity to address, embody and shape film spectators as heterosexual and male. When it was originally published in 1975, not only did it transform film studies, but this seminal work fundamentally rewired how we think and talk about film culture and film as a visual language and has been a point of reference ever since for artists, filmmakers, writers and theorists.

Mulvey 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. 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). As a teacher and PhD supervisor, she has nurtured generations of film theorists, academics, and practice-based researchers, many of whom teach and work at leading film institutions around the world, including the BFI.

The BFI Southbank season Laura Mulvey: Thinking Through Film will celebrate the BFI’s new Fellow for her scholarship, teaching and programming, as well as the collaborative films she made with theorist, author and filmmaker, Peter Wollen and later with artist and filmmaker Mark Lewis. The eight films presented use both drama and documentary to think through ideas around psychoanalysis, feminist theory, symbolism, formal experimentation, genre and the legacies of myth.

One of the cornerstone titles of the season will be Mulvey and Wollen’s landmark work, Riddles of the Sphinx (1977). Drawing on their theoretical writings and on the influence of avant-garde film, as well as exploring ideas through the prism of feminist theory and psychoanalysis, Mulvey and Wollen experimented in this visually and narratively groundbreaking film with film language to disrupt and challenge conventions of cinematic spectatorship. 

The season will include Experimenta: Riddles of the Sphinx in Context, a selection of films chosen by Laura Mulvey which gave context to and informed the development of her and Peter Wollen’s iconic work. Mulvey will also be involved in a series of educational events, discussions and talks, personalised film introductions and a one-day symposium exploring her work and impact. In addition, Laura Mulvey’s Big Screen Classics film choices will be programmed at BFI Southbank throughout December. BFI Player will have a Mulvey-themed subscription collection and will premiere a new video essay by Mulvey produced for the BFI. Full details of the season will be announced in September.

Mulvey will be joining the distinguished ranks of other BFI Fellows including 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.