Nicolas Helm-Grovas – författare

This collection, the first of three new volumes, brings together unpublished and inaccessible writings on counter-cinema, anti-imperialist politics and revolutionary Mexican art. Playful, theoretically rigorous and historically precise, Peter Wollen's writing reinvented criticism as a formally experimental practice indexing the intellectual, political and artistic histories of the twentieth century.Arrows of Desire presents texts on Eisenstein and Godard alongside essays and interviews tracing developments in film and video from the 1970s to the 1990s. It tracks the political energies running through Wollen's filmmaking and writing on global politics and culture in relation to Iran, Indonesia, Palestine, Aden and Zanzibar. Wollen's rereading of the avant-garde extends into expansive projects linking Mexican muralism, Native American abstraction and US abstract expressionism. These essays and proposals demonstrate his commitment to contesting the dominant histories and geographies of modernism and modernity.

From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen produced some of the most influential writings in film theory, such as Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema and Wollen’s The Two Avant-Gardes. In the same period, the pair made six films together. Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen: Towards Counter-Cinema is the first book-length study of their work. Moving across Mulvey and Wollen’s writings and films, it situates their work in a detailed account of the shifting conjunctures in which it was generated. Traversing psychoanalysis, feminism, Marxism and semiotics, it draws on extensive archival research to present an in-depth study of these theorist-filmmakers and the wider field of 1970s British "counter-cinema".