Returning to Riddles (reprint)

A reprint of Catherine Grant, ‘Returning to Riddles’, originally published in Lucy Reynolds (ed.), Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), pp. 57-72.
Catherine Grant’s reading of Riddles exemplifies the immersive looking and listening Mulvey and Wollen’s second film solicits, and by following its cyclical patterns and play with narrative time, she argues that Riddles opens a space of feminist pedagogy that encourages viewers to pursue questions left unanswered by second-wave feminism and begin imagining feminist futures. Grant brings herself into this imagining when she describes a generational epiphany in which she recognizes herself in Mulvey and Wollen’s portrayal of a daughter. Furthermore, by placing Riddles in dialogue with Emma Hedditch and Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (2007), a video that weaves together footage of Mulvey reading ‘Visual Pleasure’ (1975) with clips from the Hollywood films she analyzes, Grant further substantiates her claim that Mulvey’s work speaks to the present. Enacting a collaboration that does not fall into the familiar tropes and tensions of feminist generations, Hedditch’s video allows Grant to note the generosity with which Mulvey has shared her insights and memories through interviews, conversations, and public scholarship—the feminist pedagogy at the heart of her legacies.