Books by Peter Wollen

Peter Wollen is a master in the art of making unexpected connections, and this new book suggests many different ways of writing and thinking about art.

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, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and the history of art itself. Their concern is with signification: with the ways in which meanings are produced in dominant art forms and with the counter-strategies by which these meanings may be questioned or dislodged, in the practice of politically and aesthetically radical alternatives. A concluding retrospect reviews the political, intellectual and aesthetic avant-garde currents of the fifteen years over which these texts were written, outlining some perspectives for oppositional art today.

Provides a kaleidoscopic review of the avant-garde and radical subcultures of the twentieth century, and explains how artistic statements of the era redrew the line between high and low art.

Exploring the relationship between film and other art forms, this book looks at new approaches to thinking about film. Peter Wollen's new book is based on the premise that there are no fixed ways of writing about cinema, but, rather a plethora of paths leading in very different directions.