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The first book-length study of the work of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, who produced some of the most influential writings on film theory.
From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, essays and articles such as Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”and Wollen’s “The Two Avant-Gardes”shaped film theory. In the same period, the pair made six films together. Moving across Mulvey and Wollen’s writings and films, the book 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”.
“This outstanding and much-needed exploration of one the major creative and intellectual partnerships in film history—Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen— and their historical ‘avant-garde’ moment is both a monument to rigorous scholarship and a richly researched and documented guide to a brilliant moment in cinema’s history of the creative alliance of radical politics and radical aesthetics.”
—Griselda Pollock, Professor emerita of Social and Critical Histories of Art, University of Leeds
“From the very first page, this book takes the reader on a deeply engaging exploration of counter-cinema as it developed in Britain against the backdrop of the intellectual and political currents of Marxism, feminism, (post-)structuralism and psychoanalysis. The focus on Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s writings and collaborative filmmaking provides a compelling narrative that sets out so much more than close readings of influential works of film theory and experimental film. The interplay between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ is fundamental to Mulvey and Wollen’s work. Nicolas Helm-Grovas mines this interplay, proposing many new insights as to how they moved between the page and screen, as well as between politics and aesthetics. This study provides a detailed history of the ‘long 1970s’, and will be essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the experimentation that took place across film, art, theory, politics and life.”
—Catherine Grant, Reader in Modern and Contemporary Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and author of A Time of One’s Own: histories of feminism in contemporary art
“Nicolas Helm Grovas’s illuminating book on Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen is many things at the same time: a necessary contribution to a film historiography of the couple which remains to be written (Huillet/Straub, Miéville/Godard, Dore O./Werner Nekes, or Birgit and Wilhelm Hein come to mind); a detailed and fascinating account of the utopian possibilities in British culture between 1968 and 1982; a reconsideration of what ‘theory’ can mean if it transcends the boundaries of written language and extends into the practice of filmmaking; a thorough exploration of the rich and manifold dynamics of the notion of ‘counter-cinema’. For Mulvey and Wollen, it was indispensable to revisit the avant-gardes of the earlier 20th century, programmatically understanding film and cinema as part of a larger field of art and politics and re-inscribing their emancipatory momentum into 1960s and 1970s theories. Reading this elegantly written study will change your perspective on cinema, theory, and intellectual activism once and for all.”
—Volker Pantenburg, author of Farocki/Godard. Film as Theory
Nicolas Helm-Grovas is the co-editor of Peter Wollen, Arrows of Desire: Selected Writings 1963-2002. His writing has appeared in publications such as Oxford Art Journal, Discourse and Radical Philosophy.
Acknowledgments
List of Figures
Introduction
1 Film Theory, Theorist-Filmmakers, Theory Films
2 (Objective) Alliance
3 From Notes and Manifestos to Afterthoughts and Retrospects
Part 1 Elements of Counter-Cinema
1 Models
1 Post-’68 Contexts
2 The Soviet Model
3 Women’s Work: Past and Present
4 Counter-Cinema as Counter-Form
2 Metalanguage, Theory Film, Scorched Earth
1 Semiotics and Realism, or Eisenstein contra Metz
2 Semiotics of the Avant-Garde
3 Feminism/Psychoanalysis
4 Scorched Earth, or Film as Ideology Critique: Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons
Part 2 The Autonomous Space of Counter-Cinema
3 For an Avant-Garde Break
1 Counter-Cinema as Counter-Institution
2 The Destruction of Pleasure and the Pleasure of Destruction
3 A Materialist Theory of Cinema and Materialist Cinema of Theory
4 Counter-Cinema as Feminist Cinema
1 Feminism and Melodrama
2 Feminism and the Avant-Garde
3 Social Reproduction, Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Unconscious: Riddles of the Sphinx
Part 3 Leaving Counter-Cinema
5 From Complex Seeing to Afterthoughts and Retrospects
1 The Nightmare of Independent Film
2 Factography, Interpellation and the Biography of the Subject: AMY!
3 Once More on Semiotics, Realism and the Avant-Garde
4 Reconsidering Godard, Reconsidering Visual Pleasure
5 An End of an Era Movie: Crystal Gazing
Conclusion: On the Passage of a Few People through a Rather Brief Moment in Time
Bibliography
Index