Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons - Screening and Q&A with Laura Mulvey

Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons (1974) is a defining work of the radical filmmaking of the 1970s. The first collaboration between Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, the film interrogates myth and spectatorship through its engagement with the fierce Amazonian queen of Greek mythology, offering a sharply theorised feminist reworking of classical narrative forms. 

Penthesilea has been understood, from its earliest reception, as a landmark work of feminist counter-cinema and avant-garde experimentation. Contemporary critics noted its rigorously structured five-part design and its exploration of alternative didactic methods that challenged conventional cinematic language. Emerging from the early Mulvey–Wollen collaboration, the film quickly came to be seen as a ‘theory film’, deeply intertwined with the feminist and psychoanalytic debates shaping their writing and signalling a decisive turn towards radical aesthetic and political critique. 

Mulvey uses the Greek myth as the perfect terrain on which to expose how patriarchal culture constructs and contains female figures. The film stages a contrast between classical mythic representation and feminist counter-cinema, ultimately revealing how myth itself becomes a tool of ideological control. 

In more recent decades, retrospectives and scholarly reassessments have emphasised the film’s enduring relevance as a bold feminist reworking of classical mythology and a sustained inquiry into representation, spectatorship, and cinematic form, affirming its status as a significant and still challenging experiment within the history of avant-garde film. 

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Laura Mulvey and film curator Georgia Korossi.