BFI Southbank Programme Notes

Madonna of the Seven Moons

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Contemporary critics almost universally derided Madonna of the Seven Moons for its ridiculous plot, crude melodramatics and ‘purple ...

November 23, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

The Bridegroom, the Actress and the Pimp + The Woman’s Film

Jean-Marie Straub describes The Bridegroom, the Actress and the Pimp as ‘the most aleatory of my films, and the most political’. The element of randomness or chance in its genesis is well documente...

November 22, 2025 | Laura Mulvey
Thinking through Film

Benediction

Benediction explores the turbulent life of First World War poet, Siegfried Sassoon, through the eyes of the revered filmmaker Terence Davies. Sassoon was a complex man who survived the horrors of f...

November 22, 2025 | Love, Sex, Religion, Death
The Complete Films of Terence Davies

The Bad Sister

The screening on Saturday 22 November will be introduced by Laura Mulvey The Bad Sister has its origins in a 1978 novel of the same name by Emma Tennant (1937-2017), a writer preoccupied by ‘goth...

November 22, 2025 | Laura Mulvey
Thinking through Film

Die My Love

Lynne Ramsay on ‘Die My Love’ Would you call the film a black comedy? I laughed quite a bit. I wanted to make it funny. Jennifer, she’s funny; she just naturally is, so I wanted it to be quite th...

November 19, 2025 | Seniors Paid Matinee

Zorns Lemma

+ intro by Laura Mulvey Hollis Frampton on ‘Zorns Lemma’ I first began using a movie camera at the end of Fall of 1962. At that time I was being systematically forced into cinema in a way by my st...

November 17, 2025 | Laura Mulvey
Thinking through Film

Written on the Wind

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Laura Mulvey on ‘Written on the Wind’ Sexual frustration is the driving force of Written on the Wind. When its director, Douglas Sir...

November 16, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

A Cottage on Dartmoor

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. For those accustomed to the miniature pleasures of Asquith’s later work, A Cottage on Dartmoor (his last silent film, though a dial...

November 14, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

AMY! + Frida Kahlo & Tina Modotti

We are delighted to announce that Griselda Pollock (Professor Emerita of Social and Critical Histories of Art, University of Leeds) will be joining Laura Mulvey for the post-screening discussion ho...

November 11, 2025 | Laura Mulvey
Thinking through Film

Ethnic Notions + Looking for Langston

Marlon Riggs: Americans have always been more and at the same time less than what we pretended. With the quickening approach of the 21st century, greater numbers of us are giving testament to this ...

November 10, 2025 | Big Screen Classics

Crystal Gazing

Laura Mulvey on ‘Crystal Gazing’ In Crystal Gazing, the question of narrative situation revolves around the four characters we took from Erich Kästner’s Fabian and reinvented for our script. The at...

November 10, 2025 | Laura Mulvey
Thinking through Film

The Eternal Breasts

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Kinuyo Tanaka is best known as the magnetic lead actress in numerous films by Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, Mikio Naruse and others...

November 9, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

The Arch

+ pre-recorded intro by Tang Shu Shuen How radical Tang Shu Shuen’s period melodrama must have seemed in 1970, arriving in a Hong Kong film industry dominated by kung fu and opera films, and still...

November 9, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

Stella

Notes from the US press book for ‘Stella’ Stella is a landmark in the history of the Greek drama for several important reasons. To begin with, it marks the film debut of one of Europe’s most exciti...

November 7, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

A Quiet Passion

The biopic is a difficult film to get right, all the more so when its subject is an artist whose significance was understood only after their death. The view from here – a vantage point that makes ...

November 7, 2025 | Love, Sex, Religion, Death
The Complete Films of Terence Davies

Penthesilea - Queen of the Amazons

Laura Mulvey on ‘Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons’ Peter’s and my shared love of Hollywood films had, from the earliest days of our relationship, been an integral part of our daily and our social ...

November 6, 2025 | Laura Mulvey
Thinking through Film

Riddles of the Sphinx

‘A film like Riddles of the Sphinx is designed to separate form from content, so that the spectator is simultaneously aware of each.’ That is how, in 2002, Peter Wollen summed up one basic strategy...

November 4, 2025 | Laura Mulvey
Thinking through Film

Laura Mulvey in Conversation

A towering presence in debates surrounding independent cinema, gender and psychoanalysis in film, classical Hollywood, writing and filmmaking, the author of the seminal essay ‘Visual Pleasure and ...