Content area
Full Text
Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen are primarily known for their influential writings on cinema. Less known are the six films the pair made together between 1974 and 1983, as well as the many other works they produced separately. The Whitechapel film season 'Beyond the Scorched Earth of Counter-Cinema', curated by Oliver Fuke, brought together this body of work with the aim of opening up a space to explore these rarely seen films. The season began with curator Mark Francis revisiting the important Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti exhibition at the Whitechapel that Mulvey and Wollen curated in 1982, which was also the subject of their 1983 documentary on the artists. As both Fuke and Mulvey noted, just as they looked back to the Avant Garde then, so today the Avant Garde of the 1970s and its legacy is now being rediscovered.
Mulvey and Wollen's first film, Penthesilia: Queen of the Amazons, 1974, was made at Northwestern University, where Wollen was teaching at the time. The first of the five sequences that make up the film features a mimed version of Heinrich von Kleist's 1808 play Penthesilia. This is followed by a scene in which Wollen, giving a sort of lecture, provides a psychoanalytic interpretation of the play and comments on the film we are watching. Filmed in a single take, this monologue is delivered while Wollen meanders across the terrace of a house and into its living room, with the camera weaving a trajectory of its own, often leaving Wollen to approach the cue cards he leaves behind. As Mulvey has said, 'we wanted to make a film about a story, rather than a film of a story'. Mulvey and Wollen's second film,...