Peter Wollen
| Peter Wollen | |
|---|---|
| Born |
29 June 1938 London, United Kingdom |
| Occupation | Film theorist, writer, political journalist |
Peter Wollen (born 29 June 1938 in London) is a film theorist and writer. He studied English at Christ Church, Oxford. Both political journalist and film theorist, Wollen's Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (1969) helped to transform the discipline of film studies by incorporating the methodology of structuralism and semiotics.
Wollen's first film credit was as cowriter of Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger (Professione: Reporter, Italy, 1975), and he made his debut as a director with Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons (1974), the first of six films cowritten and co-directed with his wife, Laura Mulvey. The low-budget Penthesilea portrayed women's language and mythology as silenced by patriarchal structures. Acknowledging the influence of Jean-Luc Godard's Le Gai savoir (France, 1968), Wollen intended the film to fuse avant-garde and radically political elements. The resulting work is innovative in the context of British cinema history, although its relentlessly didactic approach did not make for mass appeal.
For Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), Wollen and Mulvey obtained a BFI Production Board grant, which enabled them to work with greater technical resources, rewriting the Oedipal myth from a female standpoint.
The deliberately ahistorical AMY! (1980), commemorating Amy Johnson's solo flight from Britain to Australia, synthesises themes previously covered by Wollen and Mulvey. In Crystal Gazing (1982) formal experimentation is muted and narrative concerns emphasised. Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (1982), a short film tied to an international art exhibition curated by Wollen, and The Bad Sister (1982), a drama based on a novel by Emma Tennant, were the final projects on which Wollen and Mulvey collaborated.
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