Peter Wollen, 1987), 78 min. While undertaking national service he fell ill and deserted, after which he lived in Paris, Rome and Tehran. Wollen’s own involvement in film-making began as a writer on Mark Peploe’s screenplay for what became Michelangelo Antonioni’s final international success, The Passenger (1975). Peter Wollen British film theorist and filmmaker dead at age 84 British film theorist and filmmaker. after over fifteen years of suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, my father, Peter Wollen, died yesterday. Preceded by a specially-recorded video introduction by Tilda Swinton and in-person introductions by Laura Mulvey and Executive Producer Colin MacCabe. While in Moscow, Wollen helped Jarman clandestinely film censored texts in the Eisenstein Museum, which would form part of Jarman’s polemical film Imagining October, bracketing Soviet repression with the repressive anti-gay legislation of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. Film-maker and theorist whose groundbreaking textbook was instrumental in launching a new academic discipline. 26 June – Ted Wragg, professor of education (died 2005) 27 June – Kathryn Beaumont, actress, voice actress, singer and schoolteacher; 28 June – Simon Douglas-Pennant, 7th Baron Penrhyn; 29 June – Peter Wollen, film theorist and filmmaker (died 2019) 1 July – … Mulvey was an active feminist, and Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons (1974), made independently on a minuscule budget in the US, consisted of a series of discontinuous sequences tracing the legacy of the women warriors’ myth in modern literature and psychoanalysis. Peter Wollen, who wrote and directed the early Tilda Swinton movie Friendship's Death and penned Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, an influential 1969 book about film theory, has died. Peter Wollen in San Francisco, 1986. Chon Noriega, the director of the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA, reflects beautifully on their friendship and Wollen's generous, open-minded ways of thinking. Peter attended a Methodist boarding school, Kingswood School, in Bath, Somerset, England. He continued to make television arts documentaries on both sides of the Atlantic, while teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles, from 1988 until early-onset Alzheimer’s led to his retirement in 2005. In 1967 the pioneering teacher Paddy Whannel invited him to join the British Film Institute’s education department, and while working there he wrote Signs and Meanings in the Cinema (1969). At Christ Church, Oxford, he was more interested in French New Wave cinema than English literature, and graduated in 1959 with a third-class degree. Wollen’s critical work had continued with his essay The Two Avant-gardes (1975), tracing the common roots of the modernism represented by directors including Godard and the partnership of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet on the one hand, and those of the London Film-Makers’ Co-op and their counterparts elsewhere in the 1960s on the other. 29 June 1938–17 December 2019. Once back in London he wrote a series of elegant profiles of film directors – Roberto Rossellini, Josef von Sternberg, Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford – for the New Left Review, whose editors he had known at Oxford, under the pseudonym Lee Russell. It's well worthy of the 'Treasures' tag bestowed on it by the LFF. Sitemap | However, the feature film that he wrote and directed, Friendship’s Death (1987), with Tilda Swinton playing an interplanetary emissary who lands amid conflict in Palestine, was funded by Channel 4. | Do Not Sell My Personal Information It's been one year since the film theorist and filmmaker Peter Wollen died. 1987’s Friendship’s Death invited Director Peter Wollen to tell the story of an alien robot’s conversations with a journalist – and in turn create a politically charged entry into the science fiction genre. After that it was more like a window,” she said. “Signs and Meaning” was one of over two dozen film theory books Wollen wrote or contributed to over nearly four decades. Peter Wollen (image courtesy UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television) Peter Wollen died one year ago from Alzheimer’s disease. © 2021 The Hollywood Reporter, LLC. Peter Wollen, who has died aged 81 after suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, did much to launch film studies in the UK and US. Good Fictions: Remembering Peter Wollen https://hyperallergic.com/608975/remembering-peter-wollen/ Peter Wollen died one year ago from Alzheimer’s disease. | EU Privacy Preferences. Wollen also co-wrote with Mark Peploe the screenplay for Michelangelo … He had been … Wollen was born on June 29, 1938, in Woodford, northeast London, to Douglas and Winifred (Waterman) Wollen. Douglas was a Methodist minister and Winifred was a teacher. He was a British film critic, film theorist, screenwriter, and director who worked with Laura Mulvey, Tilda Swinton, and Michelangelo Antonioni. In 1967 the pioneering teacher Paddy Whannel invited him to join the British Film Institute’s education department, and while working there … The first is Peter Wollen, who died yesterday. 1:50 PM PST 12/20/2019 Peter Wollen, writer and film-maker, born 29 June 1938; died 17 December 2019.