Peter Wollen – författare

1996 is the centenary of the birth of Howard Hawks, one of the great directors of American cinema. This anthology collects together writings from around the world on the director of such films as 'Bringing up Baby', 'The Big Sleep', 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes', and 'Rio Bravo'.

The films of Hitchcock, Welles and Godard; the aesthetics of photography and the technology of cinema; art and revolution in Russia and in Mexico; the avant-gardes in film and in painting-these are among the many topics of Peter Wollen's essays. Interwoven with fictional treatments of such themes as memory, dream, sexuality and writing, they compose a remarkable, perhaps unique, volume.These "readings and writings" are informed by Marxism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and the history of art itself. Their concern is with signification: with the ways in which meanings are produced in dominant art forms and with the counter-strategies by which these meanings may be questioned or dislodged, in the practice of politically and aesthetically radical alternatives. A concluding retrospect reviews the political, intellectual and aesthetic avant-garde currents of the fifteen years over which these texts were written, outlining some perspectives for oppositional art today.

Arrows of Desire indexes numerous intellectual, political, and artistic histories of the twentieth century. The book presents Wollen's engagement with anti-imperialist politics and counter-cinema, gathering essays, lectures, and proposals that contest the dominant geographies of the avant-garde. At once playful, theoretically rigorous, and historically precise, Wollen's writing reinvented criticism as a formally experimental practice that extends into poetry and sci-fi.This collection brings together unpublished and inaccessible writings on Eisenstein and Godard with texts that champion developments in independent moving image after the 1970s. It tracks the political energies running through Wollen's filmmaking and writing on political crises in Iran and Indonesia published under his pseudonym Lucien Rey, his introduction to Michel Khleifi's film Wedding in Galilee, and an interview concerning his visionary film Friendship's Death.Wollen's extensive engagement with revolutionary Mexican art is revealed in the paradigm-shifting exhibitions he conceived and curated, culminating in The Continent, an ambitious, unrealised project that brought together Mexican muralism, Native American abstraction, and US abstract expressionism for the first time. Arrows of Desire reveals, in its breadth and detail, the restless imagination, iconoclastic approach, and lucid style of Peter Wollen.The first of three books of uncollected essays by Peter Wollen, to be published consecutively. PRAISE FOR PETER WOLLEN "The single most influential film theorist in the English language."Henry K. Miller, Sight and Sound "A brilliant mind. Peter wrote on film, art, politics, fashion, on culture generally. To say Peter Wollen was preternaturally and uniquely gifted is not adequate."Lynne Tillman, Artforum "An intransigently original and politically engaged figure." Edward Said, Nation

Sixty years after its release, Singin' in the Rain (1951) remains one of the best loved films ever made. Yet despite dazzling success with the public, it never received its fair share of critical analysis. Gene Kelly's genius as a performer is undeniable. Acknowledged less often is his innovatory contribution as director. Peter Wollen's illuminating study of Singin' in the Rain does justice to this complex film. In a brilliant shot-by-shot analysis of the famous title number, he shows how skilfully Kelly weaves the dance and musical elements into the narrative, successfully combining two distinctive traditions within American Dance: tap and ballet. At the time of the film's production, its scriptwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and indeed Kelly himself, were all under threat from McCarthyism. Wollen describes how the fallout from blacklisting curtailed the careers of many of those who worked on the film and argues convincingly that the film represents the high point in their careers. In his foreword to this special edition, published to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the BFI Film Classics series, Geoff Andrew looks at the film's legacy and celebrates the passion, lucidity and originality of Wollen's analysis. Summing up its enduring appeal, Andrew writes: 'Singin' in the Rain isn't just a musical, it's a movie about the movies.'

Raiding the Icebox is a kaleidoscopic review of the avant-garde and radical subcultures of the twentieth century, and explains how the most powerful artistic statements of the era redrew the line between high and low art.Beginning with an analysis of the role of Diaghilev and the Russian Ballet, Wollen argues that modernism has always had a hidden, suppressed side which cannot easily be absorbed into the master-narrative of modernity.Wollen reviews the hopes, fears and expectations of artists and critics such as the Bauhaus movement, as fascinated by Henry Ford's assembly line as they were by the Hollywood dream factory, concluding with Guy Debord's caustic dystopian vision of an all-consuming "Society of the Spectacle."Finally, Wollen chronicles the emergence of a subversive sensibility as he explores some of the unexpected new cultural forms which non-Western artists are taking as modernism enters into crisis at the beginning of a new century: reversing the rules of the game and raiding the icebox of the West.

In this new collection of essays on film, all written over the last ten years, Peter Wollen explores an extraordinarily wide range of topics, stretching from an analysis of 'Time in Film and Video Art' to a study of 'Riff-Raff Realism' in British films. There are provocative discussions of the works of established auteur directors such as Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock and of the film-making careers of such experimental movie-makers as William Burroughs and Viking Eggeling, the dadaist pioneer of abstract film. The collection also includes fascinating studies of a number of film classics, such as John Huston's Freud, Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.Other essays deal with the relationship of film to the other arts, such as dance and architecture, and explore the interaction between film and anthropology. This is not a theoretical book but it is one that suggests many new approaches to thinking about film and many unexpected connections between film studies and the history of such strangely related activities as espionage, psychoanalysis, Stalinism, love of speed and digital technology. Full of fascinating new insights, Peter Wollen's new book is based on the premise that there are no fixed ways of writing about film but, rather, a plethora of paths leading in very different directions, each contributing to a new understanding of the twentieth century's major art-form.

In this stunning new collection of texts on visual art, Peter Wollen explores an extraordinary range of topics, from an analysis of "Global Conceptualism" to a mind-bending study of "Magritte and the Bowler Hat", from Gerhard Richter to provocative texts on the work of artists such as Victor Burgin, Frida Kahlo, and Derek Jarman. Other essays deal with the relationships that have developed between visual art and other media, including one on the convergence of art and fashion, and another that explores the role of art and film in creating the American myth of the West. The collection also includes a study of Situationist attitudes to art and architecture, reflections on the relation between art and technology, and an essay on Museums and Rubbish Theory.