Arrows of Desire indexes numerous intellectual, political, and artistic histories of the twentieth century. The book presents Wollen’s engagement with anti-imperialist politics and counter-cinema, gathering essays, lectures, and proposals that contest the dominant geographies of the avant-garde. At once playful, theoretically rigorous, and historically precise, Wollen’s writing reinvented criticism as a formally experimental practice that extends into poetry and sci-fi.

This collection brings together unpublished and inaccessible writings on Eisenstein and Godard with texts that champion developments in independent moving image after the 1970s. It tracks the political energies running through Wollen’s filmmaking and writing on political crises in Iran and Indonesia published under his pseudonym Lucien Rey, his introduction to Michel Khleifi’s film Wedding in Galilee, and an interview concerning his visionary film Friendship’s Death.

Wollen’s extensive engagement with revolutionary Mexican art is revealed in the paradigm-shifting exhibitions he conceived and curated, culminating in The Continent, an ambitious, unrealised project that brought together Mexican muralism, Native American abstraction, and US abstract expressionism for the first time. Arrows of Desire reveals, in its breadth and detail, the restless imagination, iconoclastic approach, and lucid style of Peter Wollen.

The first of three books of uncollected essays by Peter Wollen, to be published consecutively.

PRAISE FOR PETER WOLLEN

“The single most influential film theorist in the English language.”
Henry K. Miller, Sight and Sound

“A brilliant mind. Peter wrote on film, art, politics, fashion, on culture generally. To say Peter Wollen was preternaturally and uniquely gifted is not adequate.”
Lynne Tillman, Artforum

“An intransigently original and politically engaged figure.”
Edward Said, Nation

Film & Media

St. Paul

Arrows of Desire