Riddles of the Sphinx is a 1977 British experimental drama film written, directed and produced by Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen and starring Dinah Stabb, Merdelle Jordine and Riannon Tise.
The majority of the film focuses on part four which consists of 13 scenes, which are shot in long, continuous 360-degree pans of middle-class spaces occupied and encountered by the main character, Louise.
[1] As she wrote that classical Hollywood cinema favoured the male spectator and his desire to gaze at women, Mulvey and Wollen's film is "an attempt to merge modernist forms with a narrative exploring feminism and psychoanalytical theory".
[5] Rather than using a conventional voice-over, a multitude of voices are heard, Louise and her various friends and co-workers, which according to Mulvey is intended to as "a constant return to woman, not indeed as a visual image, but as a subject of inquiry, a content which cannot be considered within the aesthetic lines laid down by traditional cinematic practice.
"[8] Patricia Erens in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism notes that Riddles of the Sphinx attempts to exhume a female voice that has been repressed by patriarchy, but which has nevertheless remained intact for thousands of years at some unconscious level.