Peter Wollen
Biographic Data
| ID | 1375398 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Peter Wollen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Peter |
| FAMILY NAME | Wollen |
| SIGNATURE | WOLLEN P |
| AFFILIATIONS | John Brown University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 11 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Cinema: The New Wave
In the first of four New Left texts from 1963, published for the first time in English, Peter Wollen assesses the films of Karel Reisz, Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson, Joseph Losey—and surveys prospects for a seventh art capable of transcending literary antecedents, in the context of a stultifying national industry
Brecht In L.A
From the author of Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, a rediscovered appraisal of Bertolt Brecht’s war-time exile in California. Tracing the swirl of interconnections between salonnières and stars, exiles and dissidents, artists of stage and screen. Beyond Hollywood frustrations, what of a Brechtian cinema
On Gaze Theory
The author of Signs and Meaning in the Cinema traces the dialectic of the gaze from Hegel to Hitchcock, via Kojève, Lacan, Sartre, Vertov and Kuleshov. Vision and voyeurism, selfhood and spectatorship in psychoanalysis, philosophy and cinema
Necessary Love
Liberation from bourgeois marriage, central radical demand from Sand and Kollontai to Piercy, is subsumed in the age of global capital by calls for same-sex property rights. Wollen’s unmade film treatment celebrates loves unsanctified by church or state—de Beauvoir’s relationships with Sartre and Algren
Fridamania
Threads from the history of Mexican surrealism: the Blue House in Coyoacán and Breton’s protegée as avant-garde antidotes or postmodern devotional objects. The components of the Kahlo cult and its basis in the artist’s own practice of self-fabulation and masquerade, concealment and display
The Concept of Fashion in The Arcades Project
Speed and the Cinema
Jeopardy and menace, flight and pursuit: the highwire and lion’s den as kindred to the cinematic thrill. Peter Wollen reflects on the varied tempos of the avant-garde, from René Clair to Michael Snow; and on the planetary expansion of the culture of speed
An Alphabet of Cinema
Situationists and Architecture
How dreams of unitary urbanism that would confound Le Corbusier could be a summons to social revolution. The Situationist ideas of dérive and détournement as gypsy principles of chance and larceny in the imagination of a utopian space. Inspirations from Neuschwanstein to the Watts riots, visions from Constant’s helicoptered nomads to Jorn’s ceramic garden
Government by Appearances
Louis XIV’s passion for dancing, and its metamorphoses, at the beginnings of a society of the spectacle. Peter Wollen looks at the birth of ballet as a projection of state power, and the bonding of elites that court entertainment bequeathed to modern democracies
Magritte and the Bowler Hat
Why did Magritte populate his surrealist images with bowler hats? Peter Wollen takes us from the oneirics of the Belgian painter to the antics of Tintin and Chaplin, the purism of Le Corbusier, memories of Beckett, fantasies of Bond and Kundera. Emblem of working men and city toffs, cabaret girls and Orange parades—what icons have matched it for multiple meanings
Blue
An elegy for Derek Jarman, meditating on the meanings of the monochrome he took from Yves Klein for his last film, confronting death. From lapis lazuli to ultramarine: shades of paradise from Ficino and Blake to Goethe and Guy Debord
Perhaps
Visual Display: Culture beyond Appearances
Letters and Responses
Pikaia: The last human
Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth-Century Culture
Our Post-Communism: The Legacy of Karl Kautsky
Recently, as a result of preparing for this paper, I read for the first time Karl Kautsky’s Bolshevism at a Deadlock, published in German, in September 1930, as Der Bolschewismus in der Sackgasse—which we could better translate perhaps as No Way Through for Bolshevism. I found this an
Scenes from the Future: Komar & Melamid
‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying, and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’ Gramsci’s famous dictum, written in his prison notebook in 1930, seems to describe two apparently disparate situations—the Soviet Union, plunged
The Situationist International
De Sade liberated from the Bastille in 1789, Baudelaire on the barricades in 1848, Courbet tearing down the Vendôme Column in 1870—French political history is distinguished by a series of glorious and legendary moments which serve to celebrate the convergence of popular revolution with art in revolt. In
Le cinéma, l'américanisme et le robot
Wollen Peter. Le cinéma, l'américanisme et le robot. In: Communications, 48, 1988. Vidéo, sous la direction de Raymond Bellour et Anne-Marie Duguet. pp. 7-37
An Interview with Steve Fagin
The following is an edited transcript of an interview, conducted in the spring of 1987, concerning Steve Fagin's two feature-length videotapes. Virtual Play: The Double Direct Monkey Wrench in Black's Machinery (1984) is a video essay on representation, narrative, and love humorously woven through the life of Lou Andreas Salome, the turn-of-the-century romantic intellectual who captivated, among others, Freud, Nietzsche, and Rilke. The Amazing Vo…
Ways of thinking about music video (and post‐modernism)
Ways of thinking about music video (and post‐modernism)
Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies
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, semiot…
The Concept of Fashion in The Arcades Project
Signs and Meaning in the Cinema
The Field of Language in Film
The three films which Laura Mulvey and I have made together (Penthesilea, 1974; Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977; AMY!, 1980) all attack a single set of problems which are at the same time political, psychoanalytic, and semiotic. According to the Lacanian schema, each of us is subjected to the symbolic order, the superimposition of social law and regulation on the needs and instincts of nature. This symbolic order, this law, is authorized in the name …
Perhaps
Signs and Meaning in the Cinema
The Field of Language in Film
The three films which Laura Mulvey and I have made together (Penthesilea, 1974; Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977; AMY!, 1980) all attack a single set of problems which are at the same time political, psychoanalytic, and semiotic. According to the Lacanian schema, each of us is subjected to the symbolic order, the superimposition of social law and regulation on the needs and instincts of nature. This symbolic order, this law, is authorized in the name …
Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies
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, semiot…
Ways of thinking about music video (and post‐modernism)
Ways of thinking about music video (and post‐modernism)
An Interview with Steve Fagin
The following is an edited transcript of an interview, conducted in the spring of 1987, concerning Steve Fagin's two feature-length videotapes. Virtual Play: The Double Direct Monkey Wrench in Black's Machinery (1984) is a video essay on representation, narrative, and love humorously woven through the life of Lou Andreas Salome, the turn-of-the-century romantic intellectual who captivated, among others, Freud, Nietzsche, and Rilke. The Amazing Vo…
Le cinéma, l'américanisme et le robot
Wollen Peter. Le cinéma, l'américanisme et le robot. In: Communications, 48, 1988. Vidéo, sous la direction de Raymond Bellour et Anne-Marie Duguet. pp. 7-37
The Situationist International
De Sade liberated from the Bastille in 1789, Baudelaire on the barricades in 1848, Courbet tearing down the Vendôme Column in 1870—French political history is distinguished by a series of glorious and legendary moments which serve to celebrate the convergence of popular revolution with art in revolt. In
Scenes from the Future: Komar & Melamid
‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying, and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’ Gramsci’s famous dictum, written in his prison notebook in 1930, seems to describe two apparently disparate situations—the Soviet Union, plunged
Our Post-Communism: The Legacy of Karl Kautsky
Recently, as a result of preparing for this paper, I read for the first time Karl Kautsky’s Bolshevism at a Deadlock, published in German, in September 1930, as Der Bolschewismus in der Sackgasse—which we could better translate perhaps as No Way Through for Bolshevism. I found this an
Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth-Century Culture
Pikaia: The last human
Visual Display: Culture beyond Appearances
Letters and Responses
Perhaps
Government by Appearances
Louis XIV’s passion for dancing, and its metamorphoses, at the beginnings of a society of the spectacle. Peter Wollen looks at the birth of ballet as a projection of state power, and the bonding of elites that court entertainment bequeathed to modern democracies
Magritte and the Bowler Hat
Why did Magritte populate his surrealist images with bowler hats? Peter Wollen takes us from the oneirics of the Belgian painter to the antics of Tintin and Chaplin, the purism of Le Corbusier, memories of Beckett, fantasies of Bond and Kundera. Emblem of working men and city toffs, cabaret girls and Orange parades—what icons have matched it for multiple meanings
Blue
An elegy for Derek Jarman, meditating on the meanings of the monochrome he took from Yves Klein for his last film, confronting death. From lapis lazuli to ultramarine: shades of paradise from Ficino and Blake to Goethe and Guy Debord
An Alphabet of Cinema
Situationists and Architecture
How dreams of unitary urbanism that would confound Le Corbusier could be a summons to social revolution. The Situationist ideas of dérive and détournement as gypsy principles of chance and larceny in the imagination of a utopian space. Inspirations from Neuschwanstein to the Watts riots, visions from Constant’s helicoptered nomads to Jorn’s ceramic garden
Speed and the Cinema
Jeopardy and menace, flight and pursuit: the highwire and lion’s den as kindred to the cinematic thrill. Peter Wollen reflects on the varied tempos of the avant-garde, from René Clair to Michael Snow; and on the planetary expansion of the culture of speed
Fridamania
Threads from the history of Mexican surrealism: the Blue House in Coyoacán and Breton’s protegée as avant-garde antidotes or postmodern devotional objects. The components of the Kahlo cult and its basis in the artist’s own practice of self-fabulation and masquerade, concealment and display
The Concept of Fashion in The Arcades Project
Necessary Love
Liberation from bourgeois marriage, central radical demand from Sand and Kollontai to Piercy, is subsumed in the age of global capital by calls for same-sex property rights. Wollen’s unmade film treatment celebrates loves unsanctified by church or state—de Beauvoir’s relationships with Sartre and Algren
On Gaze Theory
The author of Signs and Meaning in the Cinema traces the dialectic of the gaze from Hegel to Hitchcock, via Kojève, Lacan, Sartre, Vertov and Kuleshov. Vision and voyeurism, selfhood and spectatorship in psychoanalysis, philosophy and cinema
Art (10 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Art history (5 works) · Art, Politics, and Modernism (4 works) · Cinema and Media Studies (4 works) · Aesthetics (3 works) · Citation (3 works) · Library science (3 works) · Movie theater (3 works) · Philosophy (3 works)