The Films of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen: Scripts, Working Documents, Interpretation

Description

This collection of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's film scripts vividly evokes the close connection between their influential work as theorists and their work as filmmakers. It includes scripts for all six of Mulvey and Wollen's collaborative films, Wollen's solo feature film, Friendship's Death (1987), and Mulvey's later collaborations. Each text is followed by a new essay by a leading writer, offering a critical interpretation of the corresponding film. The collection also includes Wollen's short story Friendship's Death (1976), the outlines for two unrealised Mulvey and Wollen collaborations, and a selection of scanned working documents. The scripts and essays collected in this volume trace the historical significance of a complex cinematic project that brought feminist, semiotic and psychoanalytic concerns together with formal devices and strategies. The book includes original contributions from Nora M. Alter, Kodwo Eshun, Nicolas Helm-Grovas, Esther Leslie, Laura Mulvey, Volker Pantenburg, Griselda Pollock, B. Ruby Rich and Sukhdev Sandhu.

Oliver Fuke is an independent researcher. His projects include: Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen: Beyond the Scorched Earth of Counter-Cinema (Whitechapel Gallery, London; HOME, Manchester and NYU, New York) and Yvonne Rainer: The Choreography of Film (Siobhan Davies Dance, London, 2018). With Nicolas Helm-Grovas, he has curated a series of exhibitions related to Mulvey and Wollen's work, at Peltz Gallery (London, 2019), Cooper Gallery (Dundee, 2020) and GAK: Gesellschaft fur Aktuelle Kunst (Bremen, forthcoming 2021). Fuke has also developed many exhibitions and projects with artists, and is Gallery Manager for Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK.