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

Thursday 28 May 2026

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. 

Additional information

Laura Mulvey

Professor Laura Mulvey, a leading scholar of Film Studies, has shaped the field as both theorist and filmmaker since the early 1970s. Her landmark article Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) introduced the conceptual framework of the “male gaze”, a foundational theory that has profoundly influenced feminist film studies and reshaped approaches across the humanities. 

Her work remains among the most widely read and cited in the discipline. Publications from Fetishism and Curiosity (1996) to Death 24x a Second (2006) have continued to shape film scholarship, while her interests in semiotics and psychoanalysis informed an experimental filmmaking practice that extended her theoretical debates beyond academia and into public cultural discourse. 

Mulvey has directed eight films, including several landmarks of feminist and avant-garde cinema. Penthesilea was the first of six films she co-directed with the late Peter Wollen, with whom she developed ‘theory films’ – works that merge cinematic experimentation with radical critique. 

Georgia Korossi

Georgia Korossi has worked across a wide range of areas in art and film production, beginning with writing and curation. She has credits in film programming, arts curation, and artists’ film production from her time as a production trainee with John Akomfrah, and she has contributed to major industry events including Thessaloniki International Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, and BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival. 

Korossi is currently developing her own writing practice, supporting emerging filmmakers and championing artists’ film and documentary work, while continuing to refine her expertise in inclusive digital storytelling and editorial strategy.