Art at the Frontier of Film Theory

Peltz Gallery, Gordon Square, London
22 March – 24 May 2019

 

This exhibition drew on the archives of the celebrated academics, theorists and filmmakers Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, documenting their wide-ranging contribution to film culture and exploring their continuing influence. It was curated by Oliver Fuke and Nicolas Helm-Grovas in collaboration with Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image and the Essay Film Festival, and supported by Living British Cinema.

Laura Mulvey, Senior Professor of Film Studies at Birkbeck, is best known for her 1975 essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, a foundational text of feminist film theory. Her extensive and diverse work has also included key writing on melodrama, Iranian cinema and, in her book Death 24X a Second, the relationship between spectatorship and new media technology.Peter Wollen’s Signs and Meanings in the Cinema, first published in 1969, was a landmark publication in the emerging field of film studies, pioneering the ideas of semiotics and cine structuralism in English. Other key texts by Wollen include ‘Godard and Counter-Cinema: Vent d’Est’ and ‘The Two Avant Gardes.’ He also co-wrote the screenplay for Antonioni’s 1975 film The Passenger.

Both Mulvey and Wollen combined a cinephiliac absorption in classical Hollywood cinema with an interest in avant garde film theory and practice. Between 1974 and 1982, they co-directed and co-wrote 6 films, with this exhibition focussing particularly on four of them: Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons (1974), Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), Crystal Gazing (1982) and Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (1983). The display included scripts, storyboards, letters and props, such as the series of index cards from Penthesilea from which Peter Wollen reads the story of the Amazon Queen, and the ball bearing game from Riddles. The films themselves were screened on monitors around the space.

This collating of Mulvey and Wollen’s work emphasised the breadth of their scholarship and practice, as well as their significant collaborations with such figures as Kathy Acker and Victor Burgin. It also underlined the interconnected nature of their roles as theorists, practitioners and teachers. The exhibition was the centrepiece of a season of screenings, talks and workshops devoted to Mulvey and Wollen’s work and the issues of theory, practice and curation raised by it. As an indication of the enormous interest in this work, all of these events sold out as soon as tickets became available. Full details of this programme can be found here.

 

Adrian Garvey