PREVIEW

Influential filmmaker, author, and academic Laura Mulvey has been awarded the BFI Fellowship, the British Film Institute’s highest honour, at a special event held at BFI Southbank.

The Fellowship was presented by artist and filmmaker Sir Isaac Julien, a long-time friend and collaborator who has known Mulvey since the early 1980s.

The award recognises Mulvey’s extraordinary achievements over the past 50 years and the global impact of her work. Through her groundbreaking essays and films, she has profoundly influenced the development of film theory, visual culture and feminist discourse. Her landmark 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, which introduced the concept of the “male gaze”, marks its 50th anniversary this year.

Among the guests in attendance were BFI Chief Executive Ben Roberts and Chair Jay Hunt, alongside filmmakers Joanna Hogg (The Souvenir, The Eternal Daughter), Sally Potter (Orlando, The Party), Liz Karlsen and Stephen Woolley (Carol, The Crying Game), Rebecca O’Brien (I, Daniel Blake, The Old Oak), Mark Lewis (Disgraced Monuments) and artist-filmmaker Sarah Wood. A video tribute included contributions from director Todd Haynes (Carol, Far From Heaven), filmmaker Mark Cousins (The Story of Film, The Eyes of Orson Welles) and writer-producer Isa Mazzei (How To Blow Up a Pipeline).

On receiving the Fellowship, Mulvey said: “I am really very, very touched and it’s an extremely important moment for me. I hardly know how to begin to say thank you to the BFI and the support throughout the BFI for this Fellowship. It is an extraordinary honour for me personally, for being so extraordinarily unexpected.

“Admiring the list of previous fellows, the names themselves were such a rich source of reverie, conjuring up amazing individual film histories as well as film history,” she added. “Never for a moment did I think that I would ever join these names.”

Presenting the award, Sir Isaac Julien said: “Laura’s influence is not only in the books and films, but in the classrooms, conversations, and ongoing intellectual gatherings she helped build. She was, and still is, the Virginia Woolf of film studies. Laura’s singular readings of the visual language of cinema don’t simply sit on the bookshelf - they live in the way we create, in the way we analyse images, and in the way we understand ourselves in relation to cinema and to the visual arts.”

Mulvey’s influence continues to be celebrated through Laura Mulvey: Thinking Through Film, a season running at BFI Southbank and on BFI Player until the end of November, alongside her curated selection of Big Screen Classics showing through December. The December issue of Sight and Sound magazine features an extensive interview with Mulvey.

BFI Chair Jay Hunt continued: “We all know how rare it is for a single idea to shift the entire debate, even rarer for an academic to coin a phrase that shapes a cultural conversation for decades. But that’s precisely what Laura’s work has done.

“I’ve seen women start to own their own narrative both in front of and behind the camera. I’ve seen women rise to the top of their professions and become global tastemakers. And behind every single one of those triumphs whether they realise it or not is the iconoclastic thinking of Laura Mulvey. Every single woman working in film and television owes her a debt of gratitude.”

She now joins the distinguished list of BFI Fellows, whose ranks include 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, Tilda Swinton, Dame Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett, Barbara Broccoli, Michael G Wilson, and more recently Spike Lee, Sir Christopher Nolan and Tom Cruise.