Peter Wollen

Kahlo/Modotti – Forty Years Later is the result of a visit by Laura Mulvey to the Department of Film Studies at the University of Zurich in November 2022. The booklet contains two texts: Mulvey's evening lecture at the Cabaret Voltaire, revisiting hers and Peter Wollen's exhibition and film on Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti, and Wollen's 2003 essay on the phenomenon of "Fridamania."

Focusing on Wollen's and Mulvey's curatorial work and the accompanying film from 1982, the books aims to draw attention to this lesser-known side of their engagement with film and the visual arts. The binary juxtaposition of Kahlo/Modotti, which the film and the exhibition took as a structural principle in the 1980s, becomes a playful quartet in 2024 – Mulvey/Wollen/Kahlo/Modotti – which rearranges and updates the diverse work steps of retrieval, curatorship, exhibition, filmmaking, reception, and reflection.

Laura Mulvey (born 1941, Oxford) is a feminist film theorist and director.
Peter Wollen (1938-2019) was a British film theorist and filmmaker.

Edited by Pascal Maslon, Volker Pantenburg, Caroline Schöbi, Linda Waack.

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.

The independent British film journal Afterimage published thirteen issues between 1970 and 1987. International in scope, it surveyed the many forms of radical cinema during an extraordinary period of film history.

Having emerged in the wake of post-1968 cultural and political change, Afterimage charted contemporary developments with special issues on themes such as the avant-garde, Latin American cinema and visionary animation, and also looked back at early film pioneers. It published many of the leading critics of the period and vitally provided a forum for filmmakers’ writings and manifestos.

This indispensable collection includes texts by scholars Noël Burch, Roger Cardinal, B. Ruby Rich and Peter Wollen, filmmakers Jean Epstein, Jean-Luc Godard, Derek Jarman and Jan Švankmajer, plus extended interviews with Hollis Frampton and Raúl Ruiz, and more.

The Afterimage Reader is edited by Mark Webber and features new contributions from two of the journal’s editors, Simon Field and Ian Christie.