“Few English-language critics have had so radical and widespread an influence on serious thinking about the cinema in the past 15 years as Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen. Riddles of the Sphinx (a far more successful work than its predecessor Penthesilea) is the logical practice corresponding to their theoretical work. From slightly different but complementary perspectives, Mulvey and Wollen have attacked the practice of traditional, mainstream cinema as reinforcing (in its codes, conventions and narrative strategies, its forms as well as its content) the oppressive ideology of patriarchal bourgeois capitalism. Riddles does not abandon narrative altogether - the most sustained and substantial of its seven sections, ‘Louise's Story in 13 Shots,' is in essence a re-thinking of the themes of the woman-centered melodrama - but it totally overthrows the established grammar and syntax of traditional filmmaking. In place of the expected narrative techniques of shot/reverse-shot and point-of-view, each of the ‘13 shots' of Louise's story is a steady and imperturbable 360-degree pan, each representing a step in the development of a feminist consciousness.” --Robin Wood