Fétichisme et curiosité

The French edition of Laura Mulvey’s essay—a leading figure in feminist film studies, one of the first to question the image and film writing in relation to gender—on the concept of fetishism (as developed by Marx and Freud) in the cinema of Douglas Sirk, Jean-Luc Godard, Orson Welles, Ousmane Sembène and David Lynch, as well as in the work of artists Cindy Sherman and Jimmie Durham.

“This book is not about the future, nor is it about the present. Here the various fetishes come together on the cinema screen, which has not been the dominant mode of cultural production or the heart of the entertainment industry for some time. What interests me above all is to understand the ideologies and modes of address specific to the ‘societies of the spectacle’ that structure the psyche. If the collective consciousness of a society takes sexuality into account, it necessarily includes a part of the collective unconscious. (…) I focused on how feminist theory had used the collective imagination to construct a ‘symptomatology’ through the analysis of popular culture, and particularly cinema.”

Laura Mulvey explores the material of the link between gazes—actors, spectators, creators—, fantasy, theory and the economic, historical, social processes that shape and are reflected in them, directing her curiosity towards the imagination and the feminist transformation of criticism. The French edition we offer, in a translation by Guillaume Mélère, includes a preface by Clara Schulmann as well as the two introductions by Laura Mulvey to the 1996 and 2013 editions.