Peter Wollen, who has died aged 81 after suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, did much to launch film studies in the UK and US. 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). It has remained in print in successive editions since, and provided a basic text for the new academic discipline.
The book contains essays on the director and theorist Sergei Eisenstein, rescuing him from the reputation of being Stalin’s propagandist and placing him among the avant-garde artists of the early Soviet era; on auteur theory, already proposed by French and American critics, underpinning the idea of tracing a consistent signature within routine commercial film-making; and on semiology, the study of signs, applied here to the language of film.
Rather than the linguistic models that were current in France in the theories of Roland Barthes and Christian Metz, Wollen promoted the American philosopher CS Peirce’s three-way analysis of signs as icons, drawing on similarity; as indexes, by virtue of a physical connection, such as a weathercock or spirit-level; and as symbols, from conventions of representation, such as the Christian cross. For Wollen, cinema’s aesthetic richness lay in its often hybrid combination of these, leading him to champion American musicals with their rhetoric of “New Yorkness”, the symbolism of Douglas Sirk’s melodramas, and above all Jean-Luc Godard, “unafraid to mix Hollywood with Kant and Hegel”.
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). In it Jack Nicholson plays a journalist looking for an African civil war, who takes on the identity of a man who has recently died.
With Laura Mulvey, whom he had married in 1968, Wollen then made a series of essayistic films. This was the era before video and Channel 4, when independent films were shown in festivals, and on 16mm in small-scale venues, particularly colleges. The dedication and undistracted attention of the audiences in these settings served to enhance the impact of the films.
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. It was followed by the pair’s equally challenging Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) and, later, Crystal Gazing (1982), both financed by the BFI, and largely filmed around Ladbroke Grove in west London, where the couple lived. They curated an exhibition for the Whitechapel Gallery in the East End of London (also 1982), which introduced the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo to Britain, linking her paintings with the photographs of her Italian friend Tina Modotti, and accompanied by a film in the same collage style as their earlier work.
In 1984, the year before Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, Wollen visited the USSR with a group of British independent film-makers, including Sally Potter and Derek Jarman, whom I had invited on behalf of the Soviet Film-makers’ Union. 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.
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. He helped bring together an unlikely galaxy of artist film-makers for the International Forum on Avant-Garde Film at the Edinburgh film festival in 1976.
After a short period teaching at Essex University in the 1970s, Wollen increasingly based his life and career in the US. 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.
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. He also taught in New York: among his students at Columbia University was the future director Kathryn Bigelow, who moved from painting to cinema under his influence. “Until I met him I was just looking at light reflected on a screen. After that it was more like a window,” she said.
Born in Woodford, north-east London, Peter was the son of Douglas Wollen, a Methodist minister whose postings changed every few years, and Winifred (nee Waterman), a teacher. They were socialists and pacifists, and sent him to Kingswood, a boarding school in Bath, where he became interested in avant-garde art movements.
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. While undertaking national service he fell ill and deserted, after which he lived in Paris, Rome and Tehran.
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. These brought him his first proper job, when Whannel recruited him for the BFI.
His essay collections include Visual Display: Culture Beyond Appearances (co-edited with Lynne Cooke, 1998), and Raiding the Icebox (1993), with its often unexpected reflections on 20th-century culture, shaped by his early enthusiasm for dada and surrealism, and his later encounter with the politically radical situationists in Paris. Common to all his interests was the interplay between classical and popular culture – both Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and Gene Kelly were lifelong passions.
In 1993 he and Mulvey divorced, and he married the critic and teacher Leslie Dick. He is survived by her, their daughter, Audrey, and his son, Chad, from his first marriage.
• Peter Wollen, writer and film-maker, born 29 June 1938; died 17 December 2019
• This article was amended on 9 January 2020. In the original we described Peter Wollen as an uncredited writer on Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger. He did in fact receive a credit.
• This article was amended on 12 February 2021. Raiding the Icebox was first published in 1993, rather than 2008, as an earlier version stated.
